Radio Frequency Identification
A Brief History
While there has been a lot of both positive and negative buzz surrounding RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) in the past 15 to 20 years, its origins can be traced as far back aas World War II. Both the Allies and the Axis Powers were using radar, which can be considered the grandfather of RFID technology. RADAR is an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging, and essentially works the same as RFID; a transmitter emits radio waves, which reflect off an object and are detected by a receiver.
The problem with radar was that it couldn’t differentiate between enemy aircraft and a country’s own aircraft. German pilots discovered that if they rolled their planes upon returning to base, it would alter the radio signal reflected to the receivers. Fundamentally this was the first implementation of identifying a specific object using radio waves.
Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, considered by many to be the first to discover radar, worked secretly with the British military to develop the first active Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) System. They installed a transmitter on their planes that, when it received a radar signal from the ground, broadcast its own signal that identified the aircraft as friendly.
Work on commercial applications of RFID began in the 1960s. The simplest tags only held one bit of data and worked in binary on/off format. To curb theft, the bit was activated by default and turned off upon purchase. If the bit was still turned on when the product left the store, readers at the door would detect the tag and an alarm would sound. These simple yet effective Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tags are still in use today.
Applications continued to expand in the 1970s, especially with respect to government projects. The Department of Energy asked scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop a system for tracking nuclear material. Transponders were put in the trucks transporting the hazardous material and...
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