We all know the symbols for power, bluetooth and USB. They appear regularly in our everyday lives and everyone knows their meaning. But what are the origins of these symbols and how did they evolve?
You turn on your computer in the morning, write an e-mail or use the stereo or bluetooth speakers. Symbols such as the power button or the @ sign are used every day and are firmly anchored in our understanding. Without words, these symbols are unified almost all over the world. Everyone knows what it is, and yet it is less likely to worry about where the symbols actually come from. The SRF examined the symbols in more detail some time ago – it shows that there is an interesting story behind some of the symbols.
The power symbol is based on the binary system
You probably use this symbol every day. It is now not only found on computers or stereos, but can also be found on coffee machines or even electronic toothbrushes. Its origins lead us to the beginning of the 20th century.
In those days, engineers increasingly used the binary system to show which circuits were currently active. A 1 meant “on” while a 0 meant “off”. The combination of these, i.e. a broken circle with a line in the middle, was named “Standby Power State” by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1973.
The symbol was subsequently given the status of a power button by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, as the meaning of standby was too vague for them.
Royal blood flows through the bluetooth symbol
For the history of the bluetooth sign we travel back to the 10th century. According to legend, the Danish King Harald Blauzahn Gormsson had a preference for blueberries and was therefore often seen with blue teeth; However, this is rather unlikely and only one of various possible explanations. Among other things, one of them says that blue tooth is said to have had a dead tooth that was bluish in color.
Blue Tooth is also known for the union of Denmark and Norway (in the year 958), which was the parallel for the founders of Bluetooth to unite the PC and cellphone industries with a wireless short-range connection, as can be seen on the Bluetooth homepage.
The Bluetooth logo is a combination of Harald’s initials written in runes.
The USB symbol: Divine Heritage
We also dive into the world of legends and myths for the USB symbol. More precisely in that of Greek mythology.
The inspiration for today’s USB symbol is the attribute of the sea god Poseidon: the trident. To symbolize the various devices that the USB stick can be connected to, the founders simply replaced two of the triangular tips with a circle and a square.
The @ sign
In 1971, the year the email was invented, the founders were looking for a previously unused symbol that could be used between the user name and the computer name. They opted for the @ sign. In Germany it was called a monkey tail. In Italian, the word is still translated today as “snail”. It is believed that the meaning of the symbol is a simplified spelling of the Latin word “ad”, meaning “an” or “bei”. Another theory is that the character evolved from the French à.
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