The Man Who Invented QR Codes
Unsung Science
CBS News
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead of one that could work from any angle or distance, even even if it got smudged or torn?
And so, studying a game of "Go", he dreamed up what we now know as the QR Code — the square barcode you scan with your phone. It shows up on restaurant menus, billboards, magazine ads — even tattoos and gravestones. But even that, says Hara-san, is only the beginning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even if you don't know what a QR code is, you actually do. |
| 0:10.2 | You've seen it hundreds of times. |
| 0:12.2 | It's a printed square made up of black and white square pixels in weird patterns. |
| 0:17.0 | They show up on ads, business cards, tickets, restaurant menus, you point your phone's |
| 0:21.5 | camera at it, and boom, it opens up a website or a menu or a show ticket. |
| 0:26.5 | Do you remember the day that you came up with this idea? |
| 0:30.3 | How old were you? |
| 0:31.7 | Where were you? |
| 0:32.7 | Yes, I remember very clearly. |
| 0:34.7 | It was early 1993 when I was 34, and when I was playing a golf, which is a board game, |
| 0:43.2 | during a lunch break, the concept of putting black and white dots on a grid or card. |
| 0:49.0 | It's rare to find a cultural element as global and ubiquitous as a QR code that was basically |
| 0:54.6 | invented by one single guy. |
| 0:57.0 | And today, you'll get to meet him. |
| 0:59.0 | I'm David Pogue, and this is Unsung Science. |
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