SPEAKER_02: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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 Emmet is here to bring us the story of the peace symbol. Here I am. And we're not talking about the peace symbol like two fingers up when someone takes a picture of the drawing of a circle with a little stick.
SPEAKER_07: 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 peace symbol.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, right. It's like truly, truly everywhere. And I think what interested me about it was that despite its 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.
SPEAKER_02: It does what it says on the tin. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty self-explanatory.
SPEAKER_07: They were an anti-nuclear group. You know, it was the 1950s. It was sort of the early days of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. And Britain itself was developing a hydrogen bomb. And 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 Aldermaston, which was about 50 miles away. Oh, so this is like a long march, like a multi-day march.
SPEAKER_07: Right. One of the people who helped organize that march was a man named Gerald Holtam. And Holtam was an artist and a designer. He trained at the Royal College of Art. And it was his job to design all of 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 it 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 peace sign as we know it.
SPEAKER_02: You got it. Yeah. So where does this specific design actually come from? Like what is it supposed to represent?
SPEAKER_07: Well, to answer that, I think we need to take a small diversion. So are you familiar with semaphores? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's the communication where you have two flags in your hands and you write different positions with your arms and it symbolizes different letters.
SPEAKER_07: Exactly. Exactly. So semaphores actually, the concept goes back to the late 18th century in France. And this man named Claude Shop 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 in these towers that would manipulate the things. And it was this kind of amazing way in a pre-digital age to communicate messages over really large distances.
SPEAKER_02: It's like in The Return of the King, the Lord of the Rings movie, where they light the bonfires and they cross the whole mountain range. Oh, that's so cool. Exactly. I love that scene.
SPEAKER_00: The beacon of Amontill is lit! It's very inspiring.
SPEAKER_04: The King is coming.
SPEAKER_07: Right. And, you know, so it was about as fast as communication could happen in this time. They could supposedly send a message 100 miles in under 10 minutes. 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, you know, 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 another meaning. And this became an effective means of communication. It's not terribly well used at this point anymore. 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. You know, like a child is missing. They'll hold up the flags and one to the next and then everyone on the beach knows.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_02: That's so good. Hats off to them. Yeah. What does the semaphore have to do with the peace symbol then?
SPEAKER_07: Well, Gerald Holtam used the semaphore alphabet, the flag alphabet, basically as inspiration for his design. So take a look at this image.
SPEAKER_02: 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 like kind of pointing down, you know, just like but not directly down. That's one symbol. And then another one is a person with one arm up, the flag pointing up and one arm pointing down so at 12 and 6.
SPEAKER_07: Right. And so yeah, so basically the peace sign that we're all familiar with is essentially two semaphore letters interlocking. So inside a circle. So you've got the one with the arms down.
SPEAKER_02: That's N. Yeah. Then the upright. Is D. N and D. So what does N and D stand for?
SPEAKER_07: Nuclear disarmament. Right. That'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.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I always interpreted it as a jet fighter plane. Like, I don't know that's 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 as totally normal. Right. But the fact that it just stands for N and D together is really cool. So it works as that with a direct explanation, but it also works if you don't know that. Right. Which clearly most people don't.
SPEAKER_07: Right. It's not like this is I mean, I don't think it's common knowledge. It's interesting Holtam himself had sort of multiple interpretations like in addition to the N and the D he said that it sort of to him represented a figure with their arms outstretched and kind of like a despairing position like almost like before firing squad he mentioned like a painting with a man before firing squad was a very like sad despairing image even.
SPEAKER_02: So he designed specifically for this march and obviously they accepted the design. Right right. It was it was super you know the march was very successful and it actually became an
SPEAKER_07: annual event.
SPEAKER_00: Easter time is traditionally the time for the big ban the bomb rally at Aldermaston. It was bigger than ever this year and this was the scene before they set out on the 50 mile march to London. A noteworthy event whether you happen to agree with their viewers or not.
SPEAKER_07: Tens of thousands of British people took part in these marches I learned. Fun fact that a young a young Rod Stewart participated. Good for him. 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 Aldermaston.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_08: Oh that's a good bird he has in his voice.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah he's really nice. Yeah isn't it great. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: But yeah as the Aldermaston 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 Holtams peace symbol as their official logo.
SPEAKER_02: 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 being this icon that is just everywhere today.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah you know it's obviously not easy to answer that like how does anything spread and become a meme like it's not you know it's not an easy thing to explain. But one little like interesting tidbit that I came across as I was researching was that the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin actually spoke at that first Aldermaston march.
SPEAKER_02: The queer civil rights leader.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah 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 peace symbol starts showing up in civil rights marches as early as 1960 and so there is some speculation that it might have actually been Rustin himself who brought this logo from these British marches to civil rights marches in the US. It obviously became 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 peace 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
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 there's a picture of me from you know school picture day behind like the like the lasers background and I'm wearing this like goofy little like safari vest and like this massive peace sign necklace you know like everyone loves peace sign. Like kind of massive like flavor fish. I mean you know not like flavor fish like I don't know like half dollar half dollar side.
SPEAKER_02: Okay that's pretty good yeah I'm certain I had a peace sign necklace when I was in junior high school yeah totally yeah yeah it was just everywhere maybe even more so than that. More than now but crazy.
SPEAKER_07: Certainly see a lot of them around our beloved East Bay. For sure. Do you have any I mean do you have any thoughts like as a as someone who thinks about design and logos on like why this was successful like what's 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
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah it's interesting on that I like I talked to this historian of the peace symbol his name is Ken Colesbun and he wrote he wrote a great book detailing all this history and he said that Gerard Holtam 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 you know part of his reasoning was that that it would look almost like a like a tree. Oh okay. And it's sort of a more hopeful symbol there but the other thing which I think is pretty interesting was that then it would in semaphore letters be a U. Oh not an N. Not an N which he saw as universal disarmament. Oh. Instead of nuclear disarmament which is 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 it has come to symbolize.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah so whether or not you flip it or not it really is that intent is still there. I think so yeah. Which is pretty great. It means that he created a symbol that stood the test of time whether you flip it or not.
SPEAKER_07: Right I mean you don't once you create something and it gets sucked into culture to the degree that the peace symbol did you don't exactly get to flip you don't get to flip it on its head like five years later. It was gone.
SPEAKER_02: It's everyone else's now. It belongs to the world. It belongs to the world yeah.
SPEAKER_07: That's so cool. All right thanks. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02: Also thanks to Ken Colesman who spoke with Emmet about the peace 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 Vivian Le and what is your ubiquitous icon you're going to tell us about today?
SPEAKER_06: 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. 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.
SPEAKER_01: So my job was basically to look at either a create trademark applications or write a statement to the registrar.
SPEAKER_06: And I promise that this story is going to get more interesting. She wrote trademark applications? Yes. Please tell me more. Oh man. But yeah. OK. So yes it will get more interesting I promise.
SPEAKER_02: This is the cornerstone of 99% of this whole year.
SPEAKER_06: This is a classic 99 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.
SPEAKER_02: Keep going.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So I just feel like we have to clarify a couple of 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
SPEAKER_01: of them to distinguish one's goods or services from all others in the marketplace.
SPEAKER_06: So if you're a company you could register a trademark or like a logo with the trademark office and that logo is supposed to be representative of your goods and service. And so as this mark becomes associated with their product it becomes tied to the reputation of your brand.
SPEAKER_02: Got it. OK.
SPEAKER_06: Got you so far. OK. 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 99 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.
SPEAKER_02: OK.
SPEAKER_06: So if you're like a terrible chatty podcast and their logo is very similar like it's a black grid with like a slightly different yellow you know whatever they might see that and think it's 99 PI's work and then your reputation would be negatively affected by their logo.
SPEAKER_02: Totally. That's that's the whole reason why you have trademark protection. Confusing the consumer is the heart of trademark protection. Yes exactly.
SPEAKER_06: 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. 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
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_02: As in like the classic smiley face like big yellow circle two 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.
SPEAKER_06: I mean this certainly qualifies as a ubiquitous icon but I totally didn't think that it could
SPEAKER_02: be owned by one company such that they would have a trademark dispute or even designed by anyone. Yeah it just seems like a thing that exists. It's just there it's everywhere. It's on everything. So I should actually show you what the Kumon logo looks like.
SPEAKER_06: So there's a photo of it right. Oh okay.
SPEAKER_02: So it says Kumon and the 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 head of a 90s you know alt cartoon head you know like it's not really it's not really smiling. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah like to me it kind of looks more like the the Zoloft cartoon than an actual smiley
SPEAKER_06: face. Which is like you can't see the sun anymore because of your depression.
SPEAKER_02: It has a little bit of that vibe it also just has a little bit of like you know it's it's cool looking actually. I think it's a good logo. It is it's a good logo I like it.
SPEAKER_06: But the Kumon Institute was being opposed by the smiley company which was founded by a journalist named Franklin Lou Fronie and now it's run by his son Nicholas Lou Fronie. So they registered the smiley face trademark in 1971. So they basically licensed the rights for commercial purposes to you know like Levi's 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. So if you go to Nicholas Lou Fronie's LinkedIn page he's his official title is beloved leader at the smiley company.
SPEAKER_02: Oh beloved leader. It's kind of not a good look.
SPEAKER_06: A little North Korean-y. Oh goodness. I mean he could I mean he could be a delightful fellow and this could be just kind of having
SPEAKER_02: fun or whatever but like that is definitely dictatorial rule. That's what that screams to me personally. But you know you know whatever whatever he enjoys. Go with God. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: So knowing that this actually wasn't the first time that Lou Fronie tried to block another trademark. He also tried to block Joe Boxer which I'm not sure if you're familiar with the underwear company and they have their their logo is like basically a smiley face with a tongue sticking out. And they were also involved in like a years long battle with Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart uses the smiley face in the rollback campaign. Oh totally.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. It like floats around and changes the prices on the Wal-Mart. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: That guy disappeared for a while because of this legal battle with Lou Fronie.
SPEAKER_02: So was the smiley face originally created by Lou Fronie or was he just the first person to trademark it?
SPEAKER_06: You see that is the question. Because even though Lou Fronie 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.
SPEAKER_01: He was hired by a 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.
SPEAKER_06: So Ball was a freelance artist based in Woosta, Massachusetts. Woosta, Massachusetts. Chouda. The socks. 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 Ball said that he mocked up the design about like 10 minutes and he was paid $45 for it. But the campaign started like growing and you know the buttons started catching on and State Mutual started selling actually like thousands of these smiley face buttons. But neither State Mutual or Ball trademarked the logo. I made a mistake there. I know. So have you have you ever heard of the smiley face being referred to as have a nice day?
SPEAKER_02: That sounds vaguely familiar but no I would I would always call it a smiley face.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah it's kind of like a slogan that went with the smiling face. Some people might recognize it as like have a nice day rather than like the smiley face. OK that makes sense. So the have a nice day smiley face is essentially the same design as Ball's smiley face but instead it's credited to these two brothers named Bernard and Murray Spain. So in 1970 they basically just took Ball's design and sold it to Hallmark 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 Alfred E Newman's face on a yellow smiley face. But do you know the song California Uber Alice by the Dead Kennedys?
SPEAKER_02: What yes I know the song California Uber Alice 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.
SPEAKER_06: Sorry I doubted you. Do you want me to sing all six verses or do you want me to sing the first one?
SPEAKER_02: Can I I kind of want to just see how far you go.
SPEAKER_06: Let's prove it prove it prove it.
SPEAKER_02: I am Governor Jerry Brown my aura smiles and never frowns soon I will be President.
SPEAKER_05: I am Governor Jerry Brown my aura smiles and never frowns soon I will be President.
SPEAKER_06: Oh Resi-dent. Yes I know the song California Uber Alice.
SPEAKER_02: OK.
SPEAKER_06: 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 banners. Swastikas there's smiley faces. Yeah yeah yeah. So it's like this it's kind of entering this corruption phase. Yeah smiley face. Where there's a sinister quality.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly. Yeah. And then the smiley face is reappropriated again by Alan Moore's Watchmen. Yeah. Yeah totally.
SPEAKER_02: And it was it was clearly already creepy then. And then you know he adds that splash of blood which becomes the symbol for Watchmen and the comedian who's you know like that's his symbol is a deeply flawed and awful character. And the smiley face is this you know kind of ironic but also almost not like I don't even know 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.
SPEAKER_06: You don't have a nice day when you see the Watchmen smiley face. You do not.
SPEAKER_02: And also just the violence of that. It's a graphic novel that kind of makes you feel bad. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's very jarring as a as a piece of art. Yeah. In a good way.
SPEAKER_06: And then you know as a Watchmen you 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 rave 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. Scandalous.
SPEAKER_02: I mean I just wanted to caution you that at raves sometimes there's drugs.
SPEAKER_06: OK. And at a lot of these raves the pills would be printed with the smiley face design on them. 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.
SPEAKER_02: And it just kind of takes on it's like tofu. It just takes on the flavor of whatever is around it. Yes. And it's just because it's just that's just the way it is. It's icon tofu.
SPEAKER_06: That's great. But yeah. So Dave Gibbons who was the illustrator. Yeah he was the illustrator 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 to that degree it's empty and ready for meeting. If you put it in a nursery setting it fits in well. If you take it and put it on right policeman's gas mask then it becomes something completely different. And this is kind of one of the arguments that Monica used against Lufrani and the smiley company when they tried to oppose the Kumon logo. Oh that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02: How did she do that.
SPEAKER_06: So if you remember a trademark is supposed to be like a distinct representation of a product or a company right. 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 Lufrani himself.
SPEAKER_01: That is actually a problem for Lufrani 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.
SPEAKER_02: I mean like I think probably most people attribute the smiley face logo to Forrest Gump than Lufrani or anything else related to that at all. And before I started the story I would have said Forrest Gump made the smiley face.
SPEAKER_05: So does she win.
SPEAKER_06: She did. Yeah and that is the current logo for Kumon. They couldn't stop them. Well cool.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_06: Even if it's not interesting but there's a cool story behind it. That's right.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah boring job but there's an interesting story behind it. Then hit us up. This is your place. This is your home. This is your home.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks for being. Thank you.
SPEAKER_10: Kurt and I will talk about the symbol of power after this.
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SPEAKER_10: Oh yes, yeah I do. Okay, what is it? Yeah, it's typically called the power icon, but it's also officially known as the standby symbol.
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_10: this. It's very common and it's like very specific. It's basically just a circle with a gap at the top and 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_10: And it looks sort of abstract, like doesn't look like anything in particular.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_10: You see it over and over again and you're like, yeah, that's a power button. 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.
SPEAKER_02: So it's like the circle is the zero that indicates off and then the line part, the vertical line is the one and then it indicates on. But why is the line like breaking up the circle like it is on a power button?
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_02: But I also feel like I've seen the general use of a circle and a line on other types of power switches and stuff like that. Is that common in this? Yeah, yeah, you definitely have.
SPEAKER_10: 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. Right. And that's like a hard on off switch. Right. You can find similar buttons that where 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.
SPEAKER_02: So once you establish a 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 boom boxes had a, had a like a switcher, more like a light switch where it would say like on and off or like 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 less over time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: 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 equipment. Yeah. With you. Oh, this is cool.
SPEAKER_10: And this is just like a sampling of what this is. I just printed out a couple of pages.
SPEAKER_02: Right. So you see a gas tank, a symbol for a hood on a car and a trunk opening, seatbelt sign, oil sign, battery sign. You recognize these all on the dashboard of a car. You can tell a bunch of nerds put this together because they all fit. They all work at this size. You know what I mean? They're all very uniform in size and they convey information in that size, a lot of information. But they are really kind of different too. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: So 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_10: 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 other country. And as part of making them 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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. Like that it's on every type of gadget and every type of computer or whatever. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: It's super widespread now. And there's this great YouTube video about it on a channel called LGR.
SPEAKER_04: The power symbol. I imagine most never give it much thought.
SPEAKER_10: The narrator shows a bunch of reuses and remixes and things like company logos, t-shirts, even tattoos for those who are really serious about it.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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?
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_10: There'll be links 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.
SPEAKER_02: All right.
SPEAKER_09: Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye.
SPEAKER_02: 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Kohlstedt, and Chris Berube. Music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. The rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Sharif Youssef, Avery Truffleman, 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% invisible is a member of Radiotopia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. 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.org. 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.
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