Who’s Responsible For The Invention of RFID?

It’s hard to pinpoint the actual inventor of Radio Frequency IDentification, since like most modern science, it’s based on earlier finds.

Radio frequencies and their use as identification markers is as old as radio itself, but didn’t become common until World War II.

At that point, the use of special “tags” (usually frequency reflectors) began to be experimented with as armies struggled with the new business of identifying aircraft without seeing them.

Several solutions presented themselves, including an early, crude version of RFID was tested by the British to identify friendly aircraft.

In 1948, Henry Stockman published a paper titled “Communication by Means of Reflected Power” which changed the way the scientific community looked at radio and radar waves.

In the 1950s and 60s, more advances in related technologies began to make RFID as a tag small enough to be used on most items a reality.

The advent of microprocessors, communication networks, and very small circuit printing made RFID on a useful scale a reality.

Several inventors during the 1960s were working with various radio frequency objects that reflected or transformed received power to accomplish a task.

The first “1 bit” tags were invented then, which could be turned “on” or “off” and these became the anti-theft item of choice amongst many retailers.

In 1973, the first patent for the invention of RFID chips that had rewritable memory was granted to Mario Cardullo and Raytheon was developing “Raytag” at the same time.

The scientists at Los Alamos has perfected their inventory tracking RFID for nuclear materials transport identification as well.

Uses for RFID Expand

Animal tracking, vehicle toll collection, and factory automation were the primary concern of RFID technology’s pursuers at this time.

The burgeoning idea of inventory management and tracking was beginning to take shape, but had not come to fruition because of technology limitations in data storage and manipulation.

Those scientists at Los Alamos eventually took their RFID public, however, and formed a company that became the first of many highway toll collection automation systems nationally, many still in use today.

The transponders and receivers for that use have changed little since, though the back-end (computer) systems have made leaps.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the invention of RFID really began to pay off for many companies as technology and applications began to meet.

Railroads and container companies began to use RFID to track shipments at this time in earnest.

RFID Goes Online

Then, in 1999, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was funded by several corporate sponsors to begin researching a universal tagging system that could be linked with computerized databases to track and monitor items.

This grew to over 100 companies investing in the research and culminated in 2003 with MIT renaming the initiative and going global.

These tags are envisioned for all types of uses beyond just inventory tracking and shipment monitoring.

They are now seen as marketing tools that can be used to track customers as they purchase, use, and discard items.

This raises some obvious privacy concerns and implications.

RFID’s Draconian Uses

The new initiatives by the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture to require farms to use RFID tags on their animals, the push by the military to use RFID to track personnel, and more. 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently allocated a band on the radio spectrum to be used exclusively for transportation-related RFID technology, which raises more questions about what future invention of RFID technology will do to erode privacy.

Some day in the future, we will likely look back at RFID and wonder at how we could have been so stupid or such geniuses. Only time will tell which.