From household pets and tollways, through to goods in transit and railway cars, RFID tags are appearing in more places, making it easier to track and identify objects.
RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags are small electronic devices that contain information and can be scanned, a bit like a barcode. But unlike barcodes, RFID tags don’t need to be ‘seen’ by the scanner and multiple tags can scanned at once.
The technology behind RFID was first used in 1945 by Russian scientist Léon Theremin to create a listening ‘bug’ called The Thing. But it wasn’t until 1969, that US engineer Mario Cadullo designed and built the first RFID tag.
In 1888 German scientist Friedrich Reinitzer extract a compound known as cholesterol from carrots. He found that when he heated the liquid it changed from an orange colour to clear due to the crystal structure within the liquid.