History of RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can be traced back to World War II. Counties such as Germany, Japan, America, and England all used radar (that had been discovered in 1935 by a physicist named Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt) to warn of planes coming nearer while they were still far away. However, they had problems differentiating between their own planes and enemy planes.

The Germans observed that if pilots rolled their planes while returning to base, it would change the radio signal reflected back. This basic method notified a radar team on the ground that these were German planes and not others. This is, in essence, the first passive RFID system. Under Watson-Watt, the British built up the first active "identify friend or foe" (IFF) system. They planted a transmitter on each British plane and when it received signals from radar stations on land, it began broadcasting a signal back indicating that the aircraft was friendly. RFID technology uses this same basic idea. A signal is sent to a transponder, which gets activated and then either echoes back a signal (passive system) or broadcasts a signal (active system).

The first U.S. patent for an active RFID tag with rewritable memory was obtained by Mario W. Cardullo on January 23, 1973. In 1973, Charles Walton, a Californian industrialist, received a patent for a passive transponder that was used to unlock a door without a key. Then Walton licensed the technology to a lock making company called Schlage and to other companies.

The U.S. government had also started working on RFID systems. In the 1970s, the Department of Energy invited Los Alamos National Laboratory to build up a system to track nuclear materials. Then scientists developed the idea of placing a transponder in a truck and readers at gates of secure facilities. A gate antenna activates the transponder in the truck, which would react with an ID and other data, such as the driver's ID. Los Alamos also developed a passive RFID tag to track cows on request for the Department of Agriculture.

In the early 1990s, IBM engineers developed and gained exclusive rights to an ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID system. UHF provided a longer read range (up to 20 feet in good conditions) and quicker data transfer. IBM ran into a financial crisis in the mid-1990s and sold its patents to Intermec, a barcode systems manufacturer. Intermec RFID systems have been mounted in several different appliances related with warehouse tracking, farming, and many others.

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