A Short History Of RFID

As you perhaps already know, RFID is an acronym for 'Radio Frequency Identificat
ion' - it is the thing that makes ID tags work - but you probably only started h
earing about it over the last couple of years. So, how much do you know about RF
ID? In this article, I want to take a short look at the history of this apparent
ly new invention, which has intruded upon almost every aspect of a city-dweller'
s life and that of many livestock farmers too.
The beginning of it all was in 1915, say some, when the British developed a syst
em called IFF, which is an acronym for 'Identification: Friend or Foe'. Whoever
invented it, the first known installation of the IFF transponder was into the Fu
G German aircraft in 1940 during the Second World War.
However, IFF does not identify enemy aircraft, it can only identify friendly air
craft. All others have to be treated with misgivings. The same type of technolog
y is still in use in military and civilian airplanes today. The British managed
to interpret the FuG's signals and reply suitably, giving them a false positive,
which gave them the advantage in a dog fight.
At the end of the war and the commencement of the Cold War, Leon Theremin invent
ed a system for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves and ot
her audio details. It is not genuine RFID, but it is accredited with being a for
erunner of RFID, because it was a passive device which was activated by an outsi
de source.
In 1948, Harry Stockman wrote a paper entitiled: "Communication by Means of Refl
ected Power", in which he stated: "... considerable research and development wor
k has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communic
ation are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored".
This was accurate. The difficulties were basically threefold: the devices needed
a lot of power to work properly; they were too large for use in anything but la
rge items like aircraft and they were very expensive. However, people could alre
ady imagine uses for the technology when these three issues had been overcome.
(In 2009, researchers at Bristol University stuck RFID units to live ants to tra
ck their behaviour).
The first modern predecessor of the RFID device was something that Mario Cardull
o demonstrated to the New York Port Authority in 1971. It was a passive transpon
der which transmitted information using power supplied by an external resource.
It's proposed use was to identify ships to the Port Authority for the purpose of
collecting toll charges.
Steven Depp, Alfred Koelle, and Robert Freyman demonstrated a set-up in 1974 whi
ch employed RFID tags. This has become the foundation of the system which is now
widely used all over the world to collect toll charges on motorways and in car
parks.
Charles Walton was granted the first patent to use the acronym RFID in 1983.
The principal user of RFID tags is the US Department of Defense and after that t
he civil aviation industry, although the manufacturing industry is catching up f
ast with RFID tags being utilized to track goods from manufacture to point-of-sa
le.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on several subjects, but is presen
tly concerned with the <a href="http://activerfidmanagement.com/best-rfid-print
er.html">best RFID printer</a>. If you would like to know more, please go to our
 website at <a href="http://activerfidmanagement.com">Active RFID Management</a
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