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 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 a circle indicate peace? Where does the smiley face come from? Or the power button. Today, we

sent out the 99-PI 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. cons. So, Emmett is here to brings 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.

Right, no. The drawing of like 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 piece symbol.

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 that does what it says on the 10. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty self-explanatory. 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

...