Have you ever used a key-card to open the room to your office or hotel room? Have you used a tap-payment to quickly pay for a coffee or groceries? Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the basis for being able to safely and securely use electronic locks and tap-to-use credit cards without worrying that somebody else’s card can also open your office or charge your card. It is in widespread use in offices and stores, and even in more modern home security systems. Developing RFID required ingenuity in figuing out ways to pattern individualized circuits that can be put in a card which, when scanned by the “lock”, gave a personalized identification code which the system can use to figure out if that key had access or not. Importantly it let these cards work without batteries: making them extremely useful in many settings.

RFID technology was made possible by research performed in a federal lab, specifically the Los Alamos National Labs, and funded by federal agencies including the Atomic Energy Comission and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.