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 kinds. The "#" didn't always have this meaning, though.
It's had a few different lives.
In the world outside of Twitter, though, it is still "the number sign." It has a lot of other uses, too. In chess, it represents a move that results in checkmate. In proofreading, it means a space should be inserted. On Swedish maps, it represents a lumber yard.
Excerpt from
this Swedish map key. #Brädgård, courtesy of Keith Houston.
Whether called hash, pound, number sign, lumberyard—the symbol traces back to Ancient Rome.
Its story starts with the Latin term Libra Pondo, meaning "pound in weight." This was abbreviated to lb, which we still use. When lb became standard, it was often drawn with a little bar across the tops of both letters (℔), just to show that the l and the b were connected. As scribes started writing this sign faster and faster, lb began to morph.
From left: an accidental pound sign, penned by Sir Isaac Newton, when he was trying to wrote "℔," the symbol at the right. Image courtesy of Keith Houston.
Over time, the symbol's meaning started to bifurcate—it was used for the unit pound, and it also started to be used as a number sign. It was important enough to wind up on typewriter keyboards, which helped it survive.
The pilcrow in action. Photo courtesy of Keith Houston.
Fast forward to 1963. the invention of the touch tone telephone.
The touch tone phone used buttons instead of a rotary wheel, and so unlike previous phones, the numbers no longer had to be arranged in a circle on the dial.
Proposed telephone keypad layouts, as described by R. L. Deininger in Human Factors Engineering Studies of the Design and Use of Pushbutton Telephone Sets. Image in public domain.
Bell Laboratories, a research subsidiary of AT&T,
experimented with a few different designs for the telephone key pad. They tried arranging the numbers in two rows of five, in a circle, in a cross, in a step pattern, but ended up arranging the numbers 1 to 9 in a 3×3 grid, and put zero alone at the bottom center.
A keypad in 1963. Photo from the
AT&T archives.
In 1968, Bell Labs they decided to add keys on either side of the zero. This would make the keypad into a nice even rectangle, and give users a few more options on a phone menu.
Unlike rotary phones, touch tone phones allow you to continue to dial after the connection has been made, enabling the new telephone systems, such as automated menus. Additional buttons, they realized, could be handy in this regard. They settled on the asterisk (*) and the number, or pound sign (#), mostly because they were symbols that they knew computers would be able to recognize and were already on the standard QWERTY keyboard.
A keypad in the 1970s. Photo by
Shizhao.
AT&T didn't know what to call the "#" button in their manuals.
From a 1999 issue of Encore, a publication written for and about AT&T retirees.
A couple of Bell Labs employees decided to call it an "Octotherp"—a name pretty much pulled out of thin air. ("Octo-" refers to the shapes eight lines that stick out of the sides; "-therp" is completely made up.)
"Octotherp" morphed into "octothorpe"—which, rumor has it, came from
someone at Bell Labs changing the name to turn it into a tribute to an olympic athlete named Jim Thorpe. But no one really knows.
Jim Thorpe. May or may not have something to do with the Octothorpe.
Whatever it ought to be called, Chris Messina chose to use this symbol for collating Twitter searches in 2007 because he wanted a sign that could be input from a low-tech cell phone. He had two options: octothorpe or asterisk. He chose the former.
And that is how the pound sign (or number sign, or hash mark, or octothorpe) came into ubiquity on billboards, promotional materials,
protest signs, and in your annoying friend's conversations.
Silly old phone, why do you have a key for
#hashtags? You don't even do Twitter! http://ift.tt/1GVqFRd— Mikko Hypponen (@mikko)
January 24, 2014
Producer Avery Trufelman spoke with
Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag; Andy Lorek, a former employee of Twitter; Keith Houston, the author ofShady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks; Doug Kerr, the engineer who chose the # symbol for the telephone keypad; and Lauren Asplund, who coined the word "octotherp" for AT&T.
Read Doug Kerr's in-depth account of the octotherp story
here.
99% Invisible, the greatest podcast of all time, is a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world. You can Like them on Facebook here or follow them on Twitter here. To subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, head over here.This post has been republished with permission from Roman Mars. It was originally published on 99% Invisible's blog, which accompanies each podcast.*
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