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Some relaxing holiday reading ...

It’s generally said that the roots of radio frequency identification technology can be traced back to World War II. The Germans, Japanese, Americans and British were all using radar—which had been discovered in 1935 by Scottish physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt—to warn of approaching planes while they were still miles away. The problem was there was no way to identify which planes belonged to the enemy and which were a country’s own pilots returning from a mission.

This crude method alerted the radar crew on the ground that these were German planes and not Allied aircraft (this is, essentially, the first passive RFID system).

They put a transmitter on each British plane. When it received signals from radar stations on the ground, it began broadcasting a signal back that identified the aircraft as friendly. RFID works on this same basic concept. A signal is sent to a transponder, which wakes up and either reflects back a signal (passive system) or broadcasts a signal (active system). 

Advances in radar and RF communications systems continued through the 1950s and 1960s. Scientists and academics in the United States, Europe and Japan did research and presented papers explaining how RF energy could be used to identify objects remotely. Companies began commercializing anti-theft systems that used radio waves to determine whether an item had been paid for or not. Electronic article surveillance tags, which are still used in packaging today, have a 1-bit tag. The bit is either on or off. If someone pays for the item, the bit is turned off, and a person can leave the store. But if the person doesn't pay and tries to walk out of the store, readers at the door detect the tag and sound an alarm.

Read more about the RFID history.

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