99% Invisible - 145- Octothorpe

Episode Date: December 17, 2014

If you want to follow conversation threads relating to this show on social media—whether Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, Tumblr—you know to look for the hashtag: #99pi. In our current digital age, the hashtag identifies movements, events, happenings, brands—topics of all … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and check Twitter. I'm not proud of this, it's just the way it is. Twitter always struck me as the social media platform that was the most like broadcasting. It's an ongoing global conversation you can jump into, get a sense of what's going on in the world, and jump out. It's a lot like scanning through a radio dial, but it's mainly comprised of people you know and the people they know, telling you about their day, reacting to shocking news,

making jokes, and sending around links. I tweeted Roman Mars by the way if you haven't heard me say that before. And sometimes I tweet at Truffleman. Because this producer's name is Avery Truffleman. But if you want to find out about the show in general, there's a hashtag for it. It's hashtag 999PI. The hashtag, of course, is comprised of two vertical lines intersecting two horizontal lines that looks like a tic-tac-toe board.

In the current digital world, the hashtag identifies movements, events, happenings, brands, topics of all kinds. Hashtags help people gather. That's incredible power to give to individuals. And as a character, I mean awesome. It's got this little typographic superhero story now. And this superhero story, stars Chris Messina. I'm Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag.

I'm a designer and translator. Translator? A human culture. That's probably a little bit bloated. I don't know. I don't know what I do. Chris was the first one to use a hashtag on Twitter before it was even called a hashtag. Back in August of 2007 when he was going to an event called BarCamp. It's an nerdy thing. It's totally nerdy thing. It's an event that you go to that's completely unstructured and unplanned and the participants figure it out. So the participants needed a way of organizing, which led Chris to tweet the very first hashtag, even though at that point it was just a pound sign. How do you guys feel about using pound barcamp for groups?

Putting a pound sign in front of the word barcamp helps the other people at barcamp pick out the word barcamp in their Twitter stream And encourages all the other barcamp participants to use the word barcamp in their tweets So now everyone who's interested in barcamp can search for that term and join the conversation Now let's hope I never have to use the word barcamp again So some people got on board and agreed to use the pound sign But most were like, okay, you go do that. The pound symbol had already pervaded other corners of the web. Internet Relay Chat, aka IRC, used the pound sign to represent chat rooms or conversation channels.

There was another social network at the time called Jikoo that also had these channels. So there was other stuff that came before me. But Chris was using bunches of pound signs throughout his tweets. I was putting pound symbols in front of my words. And people were like, I don't understand what you're doing. You're putting all the strange punctuation in front of your stuff and it looks dumb. But the true believers stood by the sign.

One Twitter user called it a hash tag because hash is the British name for the sign. And these were being used as category tags. And then the hash and the tag got conjoined into one word. Chris actually brought the hashtag idea to Twitter headquarters directly, but they thought it would never catch on. It looked clunky.

Then a few months later in October of 2007, the purpose of the hashtag was fully realized. A friend of mine was down in San Diego, his name's Nate Ritter, and he was using Twitter, basically pulling all this stuff together around these fires that were going on in San Diego. Wildfires were raging around San Diego, and residents were tracking the spread through Nate Ritter's tweets.

But he was prefixing all of his tweets with San's face Diego space fire. So Chris told Nate that he should switch to hashtag San Diego Fire, all one word, and then other users would imitate him. And it worked. People trying to find out about the fire knew exactly where to look on Twitter.

And this was a moment where everyone went, oh, that's what these signs are for. Now to clarify, hashtags weren't a thing that Twitter planned on. And they kind of dragged their feet on incorporating it. We kept thinking there must be a better way to organize all this information that's flying through Twitter. We kept looking for it, we never really found it.

But the hashtag and retrospect was just this obvious tool. Andy Lorich, then an employee at Twitter, officially brought in the hashtag. The users brought in the hashtag. What all I did was link the hashtag to Twitter search. One line of code took me about 15 seconds, didn't really ask anybody. That one line of code meant that when you clicked on a word with a hashtag in front of it, you'd see a page with all the other tweets that also contained that hashtag word. And basically, this helped you round up everyone who was talking about a specific topic.

And now the hashtag is a tool used in advertisements, social movements, music videos, memes, TV shows. And in conversation, hashtag sometimes. Hey, Justin, what's up? No much to me. Hashtag challenge, what would you? It's been busy working. Hashtag rising groined. Hashtag is it Friday yet?

Even Chris acknowledges how irritating this is. Do you say it out loud? Mostly what I'm being annoying or ironic. but I'm coming to accept that that's the phrase. It's getting to the point where the hashtag is erasing the symbols other uses. A friend of mine sent me a tweet the other day saying that he is delivery guy showed up and was looking for a hashtag to A. Though I'd hope that most people who make deliveries for a living hashtag SMH would know

it more as a number sign. In the States, it's usually called the number sign or the pound sign. In the UK, it's often called a hash mark, I think more because of the way it looks than anything else. This is Keith Houston. He's the author of a book called Shady Characters, the secret life of punctuation symbols and other typographical marks.

It's got a whole chapter on this symbol. And it has a lot of other random uses as well. It's used in chess to represent a move of the results in checkmate. In proofreading, if you see a hash symbol, this means a space should be inserted here. It's used on Swedish maps to mean a lumber yard. Hash, pound, number sign, lumber yard, whatever you want to call it, however you want to use

it. The symbol traces back to ancient Rome. So in Rome, the term Libra Pondo meant a pound and weight. So the word Libra, like the constellation means scales or balances, and Pondo comes from the very penderi which means to weigh. Libra Pondo and these two names were interchangeable, so Romans referred to this weight measurement as a Libra, or a Pondo. So the word Libra was often abbreviated as Lb. Lowercase L, lowercase B, which of course we still use.

So if you see 5 Lb, you mean 5 Libra or 5 pounds in the Latin sense. This is also why British currency, the pound, is represented by a stylized L for Libra. So the abbreviation LB becomes a thing, and oftentimes it was drawn with a little bar across the tops of both letters, just to show that the L and the B were connected. Scribes, our writers, got a bit careless,

so they'd write faster and faster and faster, so you join the L to the B, and then maybe the pen doesn't leave the paper before it does the little bar across the top. And so this seems to have given rise to the pound symbol. Or hash mark, or lumber yard. Over time, the symbols meaning started to bifurcate. It was used like LB for the unit pound, and it also started to be used as a number sign. It had a lot of various uses.

But it was important enough to wind up on typewriter keyboards, which is kind of the key thing, it's the thing that a symbol had to do in order to survive. Because symbols that didn't make it onto the typewriter keyboard got pretty unpopular, like the intero bang, or the pill-crow, or the manicure, these poor things. Fast forward to 1963, the invention of the touch-tone telephone. Hi, this is the Bell Systems new touch-tone dialing. The touch-tone phone used buttons instead of a rotary wheel. So unlike previous phones, the numbers didn't have to be arranged in a circle on the dial anymore.

Bell Laboratories, a research subsidiary of AT&T, experimented with a few different designs for the telephone keypad. They tried arranging the numbers in two rows of five, in a circle, and a cross, and a step pattern. But they ended up arranging the numbers one through nine in a three by three grid, and they put zero alone in the bottom center.

Years later, in 1968 they figured why not add keys to either side of the zero. This would make the keypad into a nice even rectangle and give users a few more options on the phone menu. To repeat these options press the star key. Because unlike rotary phones, touch-tone phones allow you to continue to dial after the connection has been made. So you could punch in extensions and navigate automated menus. Originally Bell Labs wanted pretty shapes on the two extra buttons.

They had made prototype phones that had a 5-pointed star and a diamond on either side of the zero. But an engineer named Doug Kerr would have none of this diamond and five-point star business. Because by that time a new thing had come into the picture, the possibility of customers dialing directly from their phones into a computer for such things as checking bank balances or validating their credit cards or what have you. Doug Kerr wanted to make sure that the two new symbols would be one's a computer could recognize.

One's that appear on a keyboard and we're part of the computer's vocabulary. So there would be no uncertainty about how a certain button would be recorded in the data that went into the computer. Bell Labs was pretty set on their star and diamond idea. So the compromise was an asterisk for the star and a pound for the diamond because, you know, the center kind of looked diamond like, I guess. And for a second AT&T was like, can we at least call it a diamond? There's no reasonable reason to call that symbol diamond.

It's not a diamond at all. AT&T didn't know what to call this button in their manuals, and this led to the creation of what some people, including Keith Houston, consider the symbol's official name. The Oxothorpe. the Octathorpe. One day I was out with my engineering partner, and we got to talking about it, and thought maybe we should come up with a new name. This is Lauren Aspland.

He worked in marketing for AT&T during the time. He and his engineering partner looked at the symbol and saw that it had eight lines sticking out of it. So we'll put the word Octo in there, and then just out of thin air, we just said, well, we'll put the word FERP, TH, ERP in there too, because that sounds kind of Greekish

and give us some stature. They called it an octo-thirp, but that morphed into octo-thorpe, which rumor has it came about because someone at Bell Labs changed the name to turn it into a tribute to Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. But no one really knows. G. is it proper to spell it?

Octo Thorpe? Rather than Thorpe, there is no proper. Doug calls it an octo Thorpe. Lauren calls it an octo Thorpe. But octo Thorpe seems to have the most widespread use. Though it's use is not widely spread. And originally the only reason Octo Thorurp ever caught on within Bell Labs was because engineers thought it was a funny joke.

The manufacturer, Western Electric, totally hated that name and pretty much killed it in the 70s. But today for a lot of type of fishing autos, Octo Thurp is the sign's real name. In typographic books, Octo Thurp is the name used. You might think of it as a technical term. Typographic nerds like Keith love it because it feels the most neutral and official. But in choosing this symbol, whatever it's called, Doug Kerr and the other Bell Labs engineers really understood that we would be using telephones to communicate with computers.

And this is exactly the same reason why Chris Messina chose to use this symbol back in that tweet in 2007. At the time, we had blackberries, we had no key phones, and these are hardware-based keyboards. But we need something that works in the mobile world, and we need something that works over SMS, because that's the way that I'm going to be publishing to Twitter. Which left Chris only two choices, the star or the pound.

The pound symbol, the artthorpe, whatever. It's probably one of the most dense symbols. And so when you're reading a sentence or you're reading a tweet, it stands out. And so you see hashtags on billboards on the highway, on promotional materials, on other social media platforms, on protest signs, in your annoying friends' conversations. I'm just going to show my dentist hashtag, bling, hashtag dental care, hashtag cavity free, hashtag, that's how we do! And this is all probably going to sound so dated in like five years

or two years or maybe a few months. Hearing hashtag out loud is going to sound like someone reading a telegram. Mr. Gower cable, you need cash stuff. My office instructed to advance to up to $25,000 dollar. He, Ha, and Mary Christmas, Sam Wayne Wright. In a telegram, as on Twitter, our speech changed to accommodate the machines. The hashtag is a way of changing our language to be more computer friendly.

And what we're needing to do is actually invert the paradigm where the computers become more friendly to humans. So we're probably not going to be using hashtags the way Twitter uses hashtags forever. But this won't mean the end of the symbol itself. It started out on paper, but then it leaped to typebredders, computers, and phones, and it seems like it's probably going to stick around. Whatever we decide to call it.

Hashtag Octathorp, Hashtag Octathurp, Hashtag Pound, Hashtag Number Sign, Hashtag Lumberyard, Hashtag Tiktok Do, Hashtag Musical Sharp if you're really lazy. Stop. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Troubleman with same green span Katie Mingle and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. I also invented the Caps Lock key. People curse me every day when they have it engaged and wish it was disengaged.

You can find the show and hang out with other people who like the show on Facebook. All of the 99 PI producers use Twitter so search for 99% of his mom's Twitter and you will find us. But you're always welcome at our place at 99PI.org. Radio Tepio from PRX. From PRX.