History of RFID

In 1945 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet government which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information. Even though this device was a passive covert listening device, not an identification tag, it has been attributed as the first known device and a predecessor to RFID technology. The technology used in RFID has been around since the early 1920s according to one source (although the same source states that RFID systems have been around just since the late 1960s).

A more similar technology, the IFF transponder, was invented by the British in 1939, and was routinely used by the allies in World War II to identify airplanes as friend or foe.

Another early work exploring RFID is the landmark 1948 paper by Harry Stockman, titled "Communication by Means of Reflected Power" (Proceedings of the IRE, pp 1196–1204, October 1948). Stockman predicted that "...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."