As you perhaps already know, RFID is an acronym for ‘Radio Frequency Identification’ – it is the device that makes ID tags work – but you probably only started hearing about it over the last couple of years. So, how much do you know about RFID? In this piece of writing, I want to take a short look at the history of this seemingly new invention, which has intruded upon almost every aspect of a city-dweller’s life and that of many animal farmers as well.

The beginning of it all was in 1915, say some, when the British come up with a system called IFF, which is short for ‘Identification: Friend or Foe’. Whoever invented it, the first known installation of the IFF transponder was into the FuG German aircraft in 1940 during the Second World War.

However, IFF does not identify enemy aircraft, it can only identify friendly aircraft. All others have to be treated with suspicion. The same type of technology is still in use in military and civilian aircraft today. The British managed to decode the FuG’s signals and reply properly, giving them a false positive, which gave them the advantage in a dog fight.

At the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, Leon Theremin invented a system for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves and other audio details. It is not true RFID, but it is accredited with being a forerunner of RFID, because it was a passive device which was activated by an outside resource.

In 1948, Harry Stockman wrote a paper called: “Communication by Means of Reflected Power”, in which he stated: “… considerable research and development work has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communication are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored”.

This was true. The difficulties were essentially threefold: the devices needed a lot of power to work properly; they were too big for use in anything but large items like aircraft and they were very expensive. However, people could already imagine uses for the technology when these three problems had been surmounted.

(In 2009, researchers at Bristol University stuck RFID devices to live ants to track their movements).

The first modern predecessor of the RFID device was something that Mario Cardullo demonstrated to the New York Port Authority in 1971. It was a passive transponder which relayed information using power supplied by an external source. It’s intended 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 system in 1974 which employed RFID tags. This has become the foundation of the system which is now extensively used all around the world to collect toll fees on motorways and in car parks.

Charles Walton was granted the first patent to include the acronym RFID in 1983.

The largest user of RFID tags is the US Department of Defense and after that the civil aviation industry, although the manufacturing industry is catching up fast with RFID tags being utilized to track goods from manufacture to point-of-sale.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.