99% Invisible - 378- Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little campfire to indicate that something is flammable. Those icons are pretty obvious, but there are others that aren't so straightforward. Like, why do a triangle and a stick in a circle indicate "peace"? Where does the smiley face actually come from? Or the power symbol? We sent out the 99PI team to dig into the backstory behind some of those images you see every day. Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There are symbols all around us that we take for granted. Like the lightning strike icon to indicate that something is high voltage, or a little campfire to indicate that something is flammable. Those icons, they might have some fascinating origin story, but their symbolism is pretty obvious. But other abstract icons are not so straightforward. Like why does one vertical line and two angled lines inside of a circle indicate peace?

Where does the smiley face come from? Or the power button? Today, we've sent out the 99pi team to dig into the backstory behind some of those images you see every day. You might know what they mean, but you don't know why they mean what they mean. We're calling this episode ubiquitous icons. So Emmett is here to bring us the story of the piece symbol. Here I am. And we're not talking about the piece symbol like two fingers up when someone takes a picture.

Right. No. The drawing of takes a picture. Right, no. The drawing of a circle with a little stick. Yeah, the one that looks kind of like the Mercedes-Benz logo that you see everywhere. I mean, it's kind of hard to think of a more ubiquitous icon than the P symbol. Yeah, right. It's truly, truly everywhere. And I think what interested me about it was that despite it's sort of total ubiquity, it has a very, very specific origin story. Oh, that's cool. Okay, so hit me with it.

So the symbol goes back to the 1950s and a British organization called the direct action committee against nuclear war. That's a good name. It does what it says on the 10th. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty self-explanatory. They were an anti-nuclear group. It was the 1950s. It was the early days of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. Britain itself was developing a hydrogen bomb. There was this growing activist sentiment that they didn't want the country to go down

that path. And so in 1958, they started organizing this really big march from London to a weapons facility in a town called Aldermastin, which was about 50 miles away. Oh, so this is like a long march, like a multi-day march. Right. One of the people who helped organize that march was a man named Gerald Holton. And Holton was an artist and a designer. He trained at the Royal College of Art. And it was his job to design all the posters and the banners and whatnot for the march. And he specifically wanted to design a symbol, something that could convey the goals

of these marchers, convey this idea of anti nuclear proliferation. And you know, he wanted to be simple, something that could be reproduced, and a lot of signs. And I take it that he's the one who came up with the P sign as we know it. You got it. So where is the specific design actually come from? Like what is it supposed to represent?

Well, to answer that, I think we need to take a small diversion. So are you familiar with semiforce? Yeah, I mean, it's the communication where you have two flags in your hands and you write different positions with your arms and it symbolize different letters. Exactly, exactly.

So semiforce actually, the concept goes back to the late 18th century in France. And this man named Claude Shopp invented, basically what it was was like a network of towers on top of these towers They had these sort of wooden structures that could be manipulated to create different positions that would symbolize certain things And so one tower would pass the message on to the next tower Which would pass the message on to the next tower and there were operators and these towers that would manipulate the things And it was this kind of amazing way and a pre-digital age to communicate messages over, you know, really large businesses

It's like in the return of the king the Lord of the Rings movie Yeah, like the bonfires and then across the whole mountain range and oh, that's so cool exactly. I love I love that scene It's very inspiring. It's very inspiring. The king is coming. Right, and you know, so it was about as fast as communication could happen in this time. They could supposedly send a message a hundred miles and under ten minutes. That's great. And so that concept was basically adapted into the flag language that you know by, I think it was British naval officers

who sort of basically made a handheld version using flags. And so you could create these symbols and an officer on one ship could communicate to an officer on another ship or communicate to an officer on shore and hold the flags in a certain position that meant a certain letter and might have it in another meaning. And this became an effective means of communication.

It's not terribly well used at this point. Any more, you can for obvious reasons. It's fairly redundant. You still do see it, though, sometimes in researching this, I discovered that the Ocean City Beach Patrol in Maryland, a sort of super lifeguard group, uses it to communicate down the beach. That's, you know, also like a child is missing. They'll hold up the flags and one to the next, and then everyone on the beach knows. That's so good. That's often them. Yeah. Yeah. So what does Simifor have to do with the piece symbol? Well, Gerald Holton used the

semifor alphabet, the flag alphabet, basically as inspiration for his design. So take a look at this image. Okay, so it's a stick figure human and they have their arms kind of down at four o'clock and eight o'clock and two flags kind of pointing down, you know, just like, but not directly down. That's one symbol and then the another one is a person with one arm up, the flag pointing up and one arm pointing down, so it's 12 and 6. Right. And so, yeah, so basically the peace sign that we're all familiar with is essentially two

semifor letters. Oh. Okay. Into locking, so inside a circle. So you've got... You've got the one where the arms are down. That's in. Yeah.

Then the upright. It's D. And indeed. so what is in D stand for? Nuclear disarmament. Right. It's so good. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like a such an abstract object, you know.

I never knew there was like a literal meaning encoded in it. Totally. I mean, I always interpreted it as a jet fighter plane. Like, I don't know, that shape always did, and I thought it was sort of appropriated ironically to mean peace, not specifically to nuclear disarmament or anything.

I just thought it was like, you know, I grew up in a more ironic age. And so having ironic symbols like struck me is totally normal. But the fact that it just stands for N&D together is really cool. It's what works as that with a direct explanation, but it also works if you don't know that, which really most people don't.

Right, it's not like this is, I mean, I don't think it's common knowledge. It's interesting, Holton himself had sort of multiple interpretations. In addition to the N&D, he said that it sort of to him represented a figure with their arms outstretched in kind of like a despairing position like almost like before a firing squad. He mentioned like a painting with a man before a firing squad was a very like sad despairing image even. So he designed it specifically for this march and obviously they accepted the designs. Right, right. It was super, yeah. The march was very successful and it actually became an annual event.

Easter time is traditionally the time for the big band, the bomb rally at Oldermaster. It was bigger than ever this year, and this was the scene before they set out on the 50 mile march to London. A note where the event, whether you happen to agree with your viewers or not. Tens of thousands of British people took part in these marches.

I learned fun fact that a young a young Rod Stewart Participated Good room And yeah, yeah, they became like they became embedded within culture. There's a there's a very famous Scottish folk singer Matt McGinn who wrote a song about them called the road from Altermaston Oh, that's a good bird. He has his voice. That's really nice. Yeah, isn't it great? But yeah, as the Altermasthin marches became this annual event, they started to be organized by this larger umbrella organization called the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,

which is an organization that still exists to this day in the UK, and they actually have Holtum's peace symbol as their official logo. Oh wow. So it's not just a symbol that, you know, like a symbol that people obviously use everywhere, but it is really an official logo for one individual organization. That's really kind of something. So like, how did it go from being a symbol used in this march and a specific logo for a certain organization to be this icon that is just everywhere today. Yeah, it's obviously not easy to answer that. How does anything spread? It would become a meme. It's not an easy thing to explain. But one little interesting

tip that I came across as I was researching was that the civil rights leader, Bired Rustin, actually spoke at that first, Alder-Maston March. So the queer civil rights leader? Yeah, exactly. Very often under appreciated figure in the American civil rights movement, close advisor to Dr. King,

important organizer of the March on Washington, and he was there. He was at that first March, and then you see the piece symbol starts showing up in civil rights marches and as early as 1960. And so there is some speculation that it might have actually been rust in himself who brought this logo from these British marches to civil rights marches in the US. It obviously became the often featured in civil rights marches and then obviously really snowballed. it became a huge symbol in the anti-war movement in the United States with Vietnam.

Everyone sort of took on the piece symbol as their own. Right, I mean, it became just a symbol of counter-culturalism, but I don't know if it's really that as much anymore. Like it got grabbed onto by commercial interests to such an extent that I don't know if it's as serious a symbol as it once was. Yeah, it's interesting.

It was almost like, so ubiquitous that it lost its edge a little bit. I mean, I certainly don't think of it as a counter-cultural symbol, necessarily. It's sort of just something, you know, who doesn't support peace? Who doesn't support the peace symbol? It's funny. I remember, you know, as like, I think I was in first or second grade, this picture of me from school picture day behind the laser background. I'm wearing this goofy little safari vest and this massive pea-sign necklace. Everyone loves pea-sign.

I got massive flavor. I mean, not like flavor, but I don't dollar, half dollar side. That's pretty good. Yeah, I'm certain I had a peace sign necklace when I was in junior high and high school. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it was just everywhere. Maybe even more so than now, but crazy. Certainly see a lot of them around our beloved East Bay. For sure.

Do you have any thoughts, like as someone who thinks about design and logos on like why this was successful? Like what's good about it as a logo, as a piece of design? I mean, I think it's really easy to draw. It's really striking. It is enough of an abstract image that you can pour meaning into and it seemed to retain that meaning even though it went beyond nuclear disarmament and went to like, peace in general. In lots of ways, like the orientation, like it doesn't have to be perfectly upright for it to work in fact, like a little bit tilted, it looks good in either way. Yeah, it's interesting. On that, I like, I talked to this historian of the piece symbol, his name is Ken Colesbund

and he wrote a great book detailing all this history. And he said that Gerard Holcomb, actually himself, came to think that it should be flipped completely upside down, so that the two lines coming off of the center line would be facing upward at 45 degrees. Forming a Y. Forming a Y, and I think part of his reasoning was that it would look almost like a tree. Oh, come. And then a sort of a more hopeful symbol there. Yeah.

But the other thing, which I think is pretty interesting, was that then it would, in semifor, letter is B-A-U. Oh, not a man. Well, not an enemy he saw as universal this armament, instead of nuclear disarmament, which it's pretty cool when you think, I mean, not that this hasn't actually happened. Most people do keep it pointed down, but I think that, you know, in his mind, it was bigger than just, you know, Britain not developing nuclear weapons. It was about like world peace, which is exactly kind of what, what it has come to symbolize.

Yeah. So whether or not you flip it or not, it really is that intent is still there. I think so. Which is pretty great. I mean, it means that he created a symbol that stood the test of time, whether you flip it or not. Right, I mean, you don't, once you create something and it gets sucked into culture to the degree

that the piece symbol did, you don't exactly get to flip it. You don't get to flip it on its head like five years later. It was gone. It's everyone else's now. It belongs to the world. It belongs to the world, yeah. That's so cool. All right, thanks.

Thank you. Special thanks to Ken Colzman, who spoke with Emmett about the piece symbol. He wrote a great book. It's called Peace, the biography of a symbol, which you can find a link to on our website. So I'm in the studio with Vivine Leigh and what is your ubiquitous icon? You're going to tell us about today. So this story actually came from one of our listeners, named Monica Minar, who is awesome, by the way. We have some really cool listeners. Totally. And she lives in Vancouver now.

But back in 2004, she was working for a law firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in intellectual property under trademarks. So my job was basically to look at either a create trademark applications or write statements to the registrar. And I promise that the story is going to get more interesting. She will trade more applications. Yes, please don't do more.

Oh man. But yeah, okay. So I will. So yes, it will get more interesting. I promise. This is the cornerstone of my name. So yes, it will get more interesting. I promise this is the cornerstone of my name. This is a classic 999 PI episode. We're going to talk about IP and it's going to be great. It's going to be great. I have no doubt in my mind. Keep going. Yeah. So I just feel like we have to

clarify a couple things right up top. And one of them is what a trademark actually is. A trademark is basically words or sounds, letters or a design or a combination of all or a few of them to distinguish one's goods or services from all others in the marketplace. So, if you're a company, you could register a trademark or like a logo with a trademark office. And that logo is supposed to be representative of your goods and service. And so, as this mark becomes associated with your product, it becomes tied to the reputation of your brand. Got it. Okay. Got you so far. Okay. So if someone wants to register a trademark, they have to submit it for review.

But if there's an existing trademark already, and the owner thinks that your trademark is too similar to theirs, they can oppose it. For example, if you take the 9.9 PI logo, which is like the black grid with the yellow square, that logo is associated with your work, right? So imagine a really, really bad podcast comes out. Yeah, it's hard to imagine a bad podcast, but go ahead. Okay, so imagine there's like a terrible chatty podcast.

And there are logos very similar, like it's a black grid with like a slightly different yellow, whatever, they might see that and think it's a black grid with like a slightly different yellow, you know, whatever They might see that and think it's 99 PIs work and then your reputation would be negatively affected by their logo Totally, that's that's the whole reason why you have trademark protection Confusing the consumer is the heart of trademark protection. Yes, exactly You got it. So Monica basically wrote to us because there's this one case in particular that she worked on back in 2004 And it's been stuck in her head for like the last 15 years

So I don't know if you're familiar with the Kumon Institute, but it's basically like an education center franchise Like a bunch of like tutoring schools basically. Okay. Okay. So they were trying to register a trademark logo But they were being opposed by another company We got a statement of opposition from another company regarding one of our registrations for a trademark for the Kumon Institute. They were sent a opposition to say that Kumon's logo is too similar to their already registered trademark, which is the smiley face. As in like the classic smiley face, like big yellow circle to oval eyes and a semi-circle

mouth pointing up. Yes, exactly. If you think about a smiley face, that is the company that was opposing this education center. I mean, this certainly qualifies as a ubiquitous icon, but I totally didn't think that it could be owned by one company such that they would have a trademark dispute or even designed by anyone. It just seems like a thing that exists.

It's just there, it's everywhere, it's on everything. Exactly. So I should actually show you what the Kumon logo looks like. So there's a photo there, right? Oh, okay. So it says Kumon and the O is a face, It's not smiling. It's just like a very simple circle and a kind of straight line like Pensive, it looks like a, the head of a 90s, you know, a cartoon head, you know, like it's not really, um, it's not really smiling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like to me, it kind of looks more like the the zooloft cartoon than an actual smiley face.

We're just like, you can't see the sun in the world because you're depression. Exactly. It has a little bit of that vibe. It also just has a little bit of like, you know, it's cool looking actually. I think it's a good logo. It is. It's a good logo I like it. Yeah.

But the Kumon Institute was being opposed by the smiley company, which was founded by journalist named Franklin Lufroni, and now it's run by his son Nicholas Lufroni. So they registered the Smiley Face trademark in 1971. So they basically licensed the rights for commercial purposes to leave eyes or candy companies or basically anybody that wants to use the design. But do you want to know the weirdest thing that I learned while researching this story? Definitely. Okay, so if you go to Nicholas Lufroni's LinkedIn page, his official title is Beloved Leader

at the Smiley Company. Oh, Beloved Leader. It's kind of... Not a good look. A little North Korean. Oh goodness. I mean, he could be a delightful fellow and this could be just kind of having fun or whatever, but like that is definitely Dictatorial rule. It's because that's what that screams to me personally, but you know, you know, whatever whatever he enjoys.

Go with God. Yeah, so knowing knowing that Whenever he enjoys, go with God. Yeah, so knowing that, this actually wasn't the first time that Lufroni tried to block another trademark. He also tried to block a Joe Boxer, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with. Yeah, totally. The Underwear Company, and their logo is basically a smiley face with a tongue sticking out.

And they were also involved in a year's long battle with Walmart because Walmart uses the smiley face in the rollback campaigns. Oh, totally. Yeah, like floats around and changes the prices on the Walmart. Yeah. Yeah. That guy disappeared for a while because of this legal battle with Lufrani. So was the smiley face originally created by Lufrani or was he just the first person to trademark it? You see? That is the question. Okay. Because even though Lufroni was the first to register the mark, he's definitely not the first person to claim to have created it.

There's like accounts that go back to the 1600s, basically, of some variation of a smiling face symbol being used. But the most widely accepted theory of who invented that classic yellow smiley face, as we know it today, was a man named Harvey Ross Ball in 1963. He was hired by an insurance company to improve morale. So he was hired to create some kind of a design that they can apply on

buttons and other maybe materials. So Ball was a freelance artist based in Worcester. Worcester, Massachusetts, Chowda, Sox. And around this time, State Mutual Life Insurance merged with one of their competitors. And every time that you have a merger, I guess, there's a lot of layoffs and sadness. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So what State Mutual did was they hired Ball to come up with this logo for a friendship campaign that they were launching. So they just like slapped it on buttons and posters and handed that out to like staff and clients

and that sort of thing. And honestly, not a ton of thought went into the design because Balsa that he mocked up the design about like 10 minutes and he was paid $45 for it. But the campaign sort of like growing and you know, the buttons started catching on in state mutual sort of selling actually like thousands of these smiley face buttons.

But neither state mutual or ball trademarked the logo. Have you ever heard of the smiley face being referred to as have a nice day? That sounds vaguely familiar, but no. I would always call it a smiley face. Yeah, it's kind of like a slogan that went with the smiling face. So some people might recognize it as have a nice day rather than the smiley face. OK, that makes it as like, have a nice day rather than like the smiley face.

Okay, that makes sense. So the have a nice day smiley face is essentially the same design as ball smiley face. But instead it's credited to these two brothers name Bernard and Murray Spain. So in 1970, they basically just took ball's design and sold it to Homework with the phrase have a nice day. And this is kind of the point where the smiley face

shot into that nebulous pop culture stratosphere. Right. Because it ends up on like mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers, earrings, and it becomes sort of this embodiment of merchandising and mass production. And because the smiley face was everywhere and on everything, the meaning behind the smiley face was, you know, just easily corrupted.

So like in 1972, it was featured satirically on the cover of Mad Magazine. There was like a composite image of Alfredi Newman's face on a yellow smiley face. Right, right, right. But do you know the song California Uber Alice by the Dead Kennedys? What? Yes. I know the song California U-R-A-S by the Dead Kennedys. Knowing a little bit about your music taste.

You've never come closer to being fired than you are right now. Do you want me to sing all six verses or do you want me to sing the first one? Can I? I kind of want to see how far you go. Let's prove it, prove it, prove it. I am Governor Jerry Brown. My O'R, my Oroz Miles and Never Frowns. Soon I will be President. I am Governor Jerry Brown, my Oroz Miles and Never Frowns.

Soon I will be President. Oh, Resa, Dundes. Yes, I know the song California River Ellis. Okay, so this is like 79, 1979-ish. So the song is about like this hippie-fascist state run by Jerry Brown. The single art, it kind of looks like Jerry Brown is the dictator and it's like a Nuremberg-style rally and instead behind him it's banished. Swastika's there's smiley faces. Yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's like this

it's kind of entering this corruption phase. Yeah where there's a sinister quality. There's a sinister. Exactly yeah and then the smiley face is repropriated again by Alan Moore's Watchman. Oh yeah totally and it was it was clearly already creepy then. And then he adds that splash of blood, which becomes the symbol for Watchmen. And the comedian, who's, you know, like that's the his symbol,

is a deeply flawed and awful character. And the Smiley Faces, this, you know, kind of ironic, but also almost not. Like, I don't even know. Like, it's already pre-corrupted to an extent that I don't even know how much the comedian as a character is subverting it. Yeah. I don't know.

You don't have a nice day when you see the watchman smiley face. You do not. And also just the violence of that. It's a graphic novel that kind of makes you feel bad. Yeah. Yeah. So it's very jarring as a piece of art in a good way. Yeah, when you read Watchmen, that smiley face becomes associated with that discomfort. Totally.

Yeah. But once you start getting into the 80s, the smiley face kind of just strays further and further away from God because acid house music and raves start taking over the UK. And I'm not sure how much time you've spent at raves. No, not very much. There tends to be a lot of drug use happening there. You don't. God, scandalous.

I mean, I just wanted to caution you that at raves, sometimes there's drugs. And at a lot of these raves, the pills would be printed with the smiley face design on them. Yeah. Yeah. So like in the 80s and in the 90s in the United States, the smiley face was kind of just associated with this rave culture and like illicit drug culture. But yeah, so it's like, it's gone, it's far from where it started. Yeah, and it just kind of takes on, it's like tofu. It just takes on the flavor of whatever is around it at this point. You know, because it's just that's just the way it is It's icon tofu. That's great But yeah, so Dave Gibbons who was the illustrator. Yeah, he was the illustrator of watchman

He actually said this of the smiley face, which I really like he said it's just a yellow field with three marks on it It couldn't be more simple and so did that degree It's empty and ready for meaning if you on it. It couldn't be more simple. And so did that degree. It's empty and ready for meaning. If you put it in a nursery setting, it fits in well. If you take it and put it on a right policeman's gas mask, then it becomes something completely different. And this is kind of one of the arguments that Monica used

against Lufraani and the Smiley Company when they tried to oppose the coupons on logo. Oh, that's really interesting. How did she do that? So if you remember, a trademark is supposed to be like a distinct representation of a product or a company, right? Yeah. But the smiley face is so ubiquitous and has been used in so many different competing ways that as a trademark for the smiley company,

it doesn't really hold any association to the smiley company or to Lufrai himself. That is actually a problem for Lufroni because it is now of such widespread use. It is most probable that most people have never even heard of the name being associated with the smiley face. Yeah, I mean, like, I think probably most people attribute the smiley face logo to Forrest Gump, then Lufroni or anything else related to it. Yes, and before I started the story,

I would have said Forrest Gump made the smiley face. So does she win? She did, yeah, and that is the current logo for Cuman. They couldn't stop them. Oh, well cool, there you go. Yeah, well, that's awesome. Well, thanks Monica for writing in. Yeah, if you have an interesting job, you've done something cool.

Yeah, even if it's not interesting, but there's a full story behind it. That's right. Yeah, boring job, but there's an interesting story behind it. Hit us up. This is your home. This is your home. This is your home. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. I'll talk about the symbol of power after this. So I'm in the studio with Kurt Colstead and you have an icon that you want to talk about. Oh yes, yeah, dude. Okay, what is it? Yeah, it's typically called the power icon, but it's also officially known as the standby symbol. Oh, okay. This is what you would see on a computer, for example.

Oh, yeah. If you've spent any time at all around computers, you've seen power buttons like this. Yeah. It's very common and it's like very specific. It's basically just a circle with a gap at the top. And then there's this vertical line that runs up through the center of the circle and through that gap.

Yeah, this is pretty much what you see on every computer. You press the button to start the computer or to put it to sleep or turn it off or that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it looks sort of abstract. Like doesn't look like anything in particular. But it's also one of those ubiquitous icons that like the ones we've been talking about that,

it seems to make sense as to what it is, even though I've never really thought about how abstract it is or how literal it is at all. Yeah, yeah. You learn it from context. You see it over and over again. You're like, yeah, that's a power button. Right.

But it's actually based on binary notation. So essentially, binary is about on states and off states, which are usually represented by ones and zeros. And those, of course, look a lot like vertical lines and circles. Okay, so like the circle is the zero that indicates off, and then the line part, the vertical line, is the one, and then indicates on. But why is the line breaking up the circle like it is on a power button? Well, so that's why this is called the standby symbol because it's not a complete power on

off symbol. And it's used mostly to put devices to sleep and to wake them back up again. So it doesn't actually physically cut off power going to a device. It's not like pulling the plug or removing the battery or something. But I also feel like I've seen the general use of circle and a line on other types of power switches and stuff like that. Is that common? Yeah, you definitely have. There's a bunch of power-related symbols that all use lines and circles. So sometimes you'll see a switch, for example, with a line on one side and a circle on the other. And that's like a hard on off switch. Right.

You can find similar buttons that wear like the circle completely encloses the line. So that way there's no ambiguity. You know, like this is going to turn something completely on or completely off. So once you set this connection between the binary zero and one, all these other power buttons pretty much make sense.

They have a little bit of variation, but they pretty much are that. But there's also, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, like Boomboxes had a switcher, more like a light switch, where it would say on and off or on a stereo, it would be a push button, but it would say power. I think that's kind of gone away over time, or it's less over time.

Yeah, it was like a really common thing for a long time to use English language labels, which people could read. But in the mid-1900s, the late 1900s, as electronics started to get made around the world and then shipped around the world, languages became sort of a barrier, right? You needed something more universal. Also, if you think about it, words take up a lot of space compared to symbols. So this is where the IEC comes in. And that's the nonprofit International Electro Technical Commission. And in the 1970s, they published this document called Graphical Symbols for Use on Equip equipment. Yeah, with you. Then, then.

Okay. Oh, this is cool. And this is just like a sampling of what this is. I just printed out a couple of pages. Right. You see like a gas tank, a symbol for a hood, on a car, and a trunk, like opening, seat belt sign, oil sign, battery sign. These are all, you recognize these all on the dashboard of a car.

You can tell a bunch of nerds put this together because there's like, they all like fit. They all work at this size. You know what I mean? They're all like very uniform in size and they convey information in that size, like a lot of information. But they are really kind of different to you. You know? Yeah.

And the IEC came up with some of these, but a lot of them they just adopted or adapted from what was already being widely used and then they just folded them into this huge set of recommended standards. They look kind of like tech hieroglyphics. They convey a lot of information if you put them all together It almost tells a little story, especially I'm not the best at maintaining my car So various lights are on in my car at all times. So I'm familiar with a lot of these symbols. Yeah, yeah. And the idea is that they are supposed to be familiar and they're supposed to work

across languages and at different scales. Be as intuitive and universal as possible. So if you travel to another country and drive a car and you see a light come on, hopefully, you'll also know what's wrong in that, the other country. Right. And as part of making the universal and understandable, the IEC goes out of its way to create these visually similar sets or families of symbols. And so that way once you understand one of them, you can start to make guesses about what other symbols would look like. Yeah, so I'm flipping through and I recognize a lot of these symbols, but the power icon one that we started talking about, that one, you see variations of that more than you see any of these.

You know, like that it's on every type of gadget and every type of computer or whatever. Yeah, it's super widespread now. And there's this great YouTube video about it on a channel called LGR. The Power Symbol. I imagine most never give it much thought. The narrator chose a bunch of reuses and remixes. And things like company logos, t-shirts, even tattoos for those who are really serious about it. Of all the symbols defined in IEC 60417, the one for power is arguably the one to have best achieved its goal of ubiquity around the world, especially among the tech-loving community.

So, the symbol really has become recognizable and ubiquitous, which from the perspective of the IEC is great. That means it's working as intended. Can people find the IEC manual online? Oh yeah, they'll be linked on the website to the IEC manual. I'll embed this video that I was just talking about. You can go wild and play guessing games trying to figure out what the different symbols mean.

Cool. Alright, thanks Kurt. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Emmith Fitzgerald, Vivian Leigh, Kurt Colstead, and Chris Perubey, music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. The rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Sheree Fusef, Avery Trollfument, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown,

Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Orc. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But if you want us to explore the origin of other ubiquitous icons, leave a comment at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.