📱🔍 The QR code wasn’t invented for marketing — it was created because factory workers kept making one simple mistake.

In the 1990s, a Japanese company named Denso Wave faced a growing problem in their factories:

Workers had to scan hundreds of tiny barcodes on car parts.
The barcodes were slow, confusing, and easy to mis-scan.

One engineer, Masahiro Hara, noticed something unusual:
Workers often held the barcode scanner too far or too close, causing errors.

So he asked himself:
“What if a code could be scanned instantly… from any angle or distance?”

Inspired by a board game called Go, he designed a square code with tiny black-and-white patterns that could be read in milliseconds.

The result?
👉 The first QR Code (Quick Response Code), created in 1994.

At the time, nobody imagined it would be used beyond factories.

Fast forward:
QR codes now power

• digital payments
• restaurant menus
• tickets
• deliveries
• WiFi sharing
• and billions of transactions every day

All because an engineer wanted to fix one workplace annoyance.

Huge innovations often start with one simple question:
“How can this be easier?”