Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service

with me Rachel Naylor. Today I'm taking you back more than 50 years to when one of the

most well known logos in the world was created. I've been speaking to the man who designed

the recycling symbol.

It's 1970 and we're in LA. 23-year-old Gary Anderson is studying architecture at the University

of Southern California. One day he spots a poster on campus. It's a competition to mark

the first Earth Day on the 22nd of April to design a logo for recycled paper products.

It was my last year in school. I didn't really know what I was going to be doing next for sure.

And when I read the rules for the competition it seemed like it was something that I could do

without too much difficulty. I didn't need a lot of special resources. I didn't need any help.

I could do it all by myself. I didn't need a team. So it just seemed like it was quite doable.

So doable in fact that Gary submitted three entries which were variations on the same theme.

This was before computers so I did it all by hand with conventional drafting instruments,

compasses, triangles, a t-square. How long did he spend on the winning design?

Actually not that long. I'd say it was probably the main work where it was less than a day and

probably you know as I was mulling it over and making tweaks and less than a week.

His main inspiration was a mathematical concept called the Mobius Strip,

which is a surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together

with a half twist. I had read a little poem when I was in elementary school, Hickory Dockery Dick,

the mouse on the Mobius Strip. The strip revolved, the mouse dissolved in a chrono-dimensional skip.

Well I was really too young to understand much of that at all but I looked into what that all meant

and I was just fascinated with that whole concept ever since, even now. And so I took that idea

...