Milton Field
1917-2009
In addition to his son, he is survived by a
daughter, Lori Ellen Concilio of McDonald;
two sisters, Irene Schepartz of Tallahassee,
Fla., and Lois Shapiro of Pittsburgh; and
two granddaughters.
Milton Field 91, who devoted his working
life to codes -- first breaking Japanese
codes for the U.S. Army during World War II
and later developing bar codes used on
consumer goods.
The Hill District native graduated at age 16
from Schenley High School in 1933 and got a
job at James H. Matthews & Co., which later
became Matthews International, a Pittsburgh
firm whose products include stamping and
marking materials.
While beginning what would become a nearly
50-year career with Matthews, Mr. Field
studied printing at Connelly Trade School
and later at Carnegie Institute of
Technology, a predecessor to Carnegie Mellon
University, where in 1940 he earned a degree
in print management and graphic arts.
When Mr. Field enlisted in the Army in
August 1941, he was selected to train as a
code breaker for the Signal Corps and the
following year was sent to New Guinea in the
South Pacific.
"Bad days for the Allies. We were on the
defensive with minimal forces," Mr. Field
told The Pittsburgh Press in a 1978
interview. But the young soldier was on the
team that decoded an intercepted message
that detailed Japanese plans to attack New
Guinea in early 1943. Using the advance
information, Allied air forces assembled
bombing crews and eventually won a major
victory in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.
Mr. Field's unit received a Presidential
Citation for its efforts and Mr. Field also
earned three Bronze Stars during his
military service, said his son, James Field
of Mt. Lebanon.
Milt Field is truly one of the founding
fathers of the Auto-ID industry. When the U.
P. C. Symbol was introduced, Milt
immediately recognized the great potential
in this technology. At this time, working at
Matthews International Corporation, he
became a pioneer in the implementation of
this technology across a wide range of
applications.
Milt created the Symbol Systems business
unit at Matthews, a major supplier of plates
to the printing and graphics industry. This
unit started out creating U. P. C. bar code
symbol artwork using a labor intense method
to produce the film masters. Recognizing the
need for faster, more efficient and a more
accurate method for producing masters, Milt
worked with Perkin-Elmer Corporation (and
Harry Palmer, who later founded RJS) to
develop a state of the art photo-plotter
(micro-densitometer) that quickly and
accurately produced symbol film masters to a
tolerance of ±5 microns.
Again, working with Harry Palmer, Milt
obtained for Matthews the initial exclusive
sales and marketing rights for the first
automatic bar code verification device, the
Matthews Micro-Chek (also known as the
Auto-Scan). This unit was, for many years,
the only device capable of verifying a film
master to the ±5 microns spec.
In the mid-1970’s the U.P.C. program was
struggling to become accepted. [In fact in
1976 Business Week published an article
headlined ‘The Supermarket Scanner That
Failed’.] Milt developed a series of
educational seminars sponsored by Matthews
to promote symbol source-marking to
supermarket suppliers, a first for any AIDC
equipment vendor. Milt championed the
technology to a broad range of industries;
and was particularly influential in the
adoption of the U.P.C. by the magazine,
recording and alcoholic beverage industries.
Because the Graphics Division of Matthews
was a major supplier of plates for printing
on corrugated, both in the U.S. (14 plants)
and Europe, Milt was a pioneer in the
development of the SCC using the Interleaved
Two of Five symbology. He was a charter
member of the Distribution Symbology Study
Group (DSSG) that developed the
specifications for the SCC, a major initial
step toward the use of barcodes in logistics
and warehouse management.
Milt received a BA in Graphic Arts from
Carnegie Institute of Technology (latter to
become Carnegie Mellon University).
