The History of the QR Code: From Car Parts to Your Phone

The QR code is now everywhere, but it began as an industrial tool.

The problem: tracking car parts

In the early 1990s, the Japanese company Denso, a supplier to the car industry, used ordinary barcodes to track parts. Ordinary barcodes hold little data and have to be scanned one at a time, from a good angle. Workers had to scan several codes on a single box.

The invention

In 1994, a team at Denso led by Masahiro Hara developed a two-dimensional code that could store much more data and be read quickly from any direction. The name QR stands for Quick Response.

The distinctive design of three corner squares came from a search for a pattern that would rarely appear in ordinary printing, so a scanner would not mistake something else for a code.

Open for everyone

Denso Wave, the company's spin-off, chose not to enforce its patent rights over the code's standard use. That helped the code spread. QR Code is, however, a registered trademark of Denso Wave.

Spread beyond factories

• Logistics and manufacturing adopted it first.
• Mobile phones in Japan began to include QR readers in the early 2000s.
• Smartphone cameras later made scanning easy for everyone.
• Payments, menus, tickets and links made codes a daily sight.

Why it lasted

QR codes are:

• cheap, since they need only ink
• fast to read
• flexible, holding links, text and more
• error tolerant

Today

From Wi-Fi sharing to boarding passes, QR codes connect printed things to digital ones. A scanner in your pocket turns any of them into a link, a contact or a note.

QR Code Scanner opens directly to the camera, so a code from 1994's idea can be read in a moment today.

Scan and create QR codes and barcodes with QR Code Scanner →