People mindblown as man spends years discovering origin of 'S' we drew in school

1071     0
The
The 'S' is something almost all of us will remember drawing in school (Image: YouTube/LEMMiNO)

Do you remember the stylised version of the letter 'S' that school kids up and down the country used to scribble in their exercise books? Many of us will be familiar with the graffiti-style drawing - composed of 14 lines and known as the 'universal S' - but how many of us know where it came from?

Most of us who drew the letter in school will have picked it up from other friends or seen it doodled on the back of a toilet cubicle door and decided to replicate it ourselves, and there probably aren't many who know where it originated. But one man was so determined to find out where the universal S came from that he dedicated five years to uncovering its secret.

David Wangstedt, a YouTuber from Sweden who goes by the username Lemmino, uploaded a video in which he said he wanted to find the origin of the letter after he remembered drawing it when he was in school but didn't know where it had come from. And while he believed it was just something he and his friends had done, he soon realised that people all over the world from countries including the USA, Canada, France, Greece, Australia, and Japan also recognised the symbol.

So, he began digging into the lore of the letter, starting with a painstaking trawl through Reddit to try and find the drawing's first recorded usage. David's labour-intensive quest had plenty of false leads and dead ends, but he eventually traced it back as far as a US clothing brand named Stussy, which was founded in the 1980s.

And while some believe the 'S' symbol originated in Stussy's logo, David claimed he couldn't find any "evidence" of that in the company's clothing. He even said in his video that a spokesperson for Stussy told Vice in 2016 that the symbol predates the founding of the company. The spokesperson said: "No, this is not an original Stussy logo. I personally get asked this a lot, but people have been drawing this S long before Stussy was established. People have just assumed it was Stussy and it's sort of spread from there. It's actually quite amusing."

Viral sausage roll debate leaves Brits confused about how to order at Greggs rridzziqddidqrinvViral sausage roll debate leaves Brits confused about how to order at Greggs

Other dead ends David came across included ties to the Suzuki logo - which David ruled out as the symbols are noticeably different - and links to rock or metal bands, although the YouTuber couldn't find any bands that used the logo prior to 1985. In total, David sifted through over 27,000 comments online to find leads for the origin of the logo, and eventually found uses of the symbol that dated back to the 1970s.

People mindblown as man spends years discovering origin of 'S' we drew in schoolThe earliest use of the symbol appeared in a book from 1890 (YouTube/LEMMiNO)

Jon Naar, a photographer who specialised in graffiti, used the 'universal S' in several different locations for his artwork in the 70s, but he still wasn't the first person to ever use the logo - as David found the earliest recorded use of the symbol dated back all the way to the 1890s.

The YouTuber revealed an early version of the symbol was used in an image from a book titled Mechanical Graphics by Frederick Newton Willson, who taught geometry at Princeton University in the US. After making his findings, David speculated that "as an expert of descriptive geometry and technical drawing, Willson might have taught his students this neat trick of how to draw a symmetrical S.

David concluded his video by saying we "may never know" where the 'universal S' came from, but his research still left people mindblown in the comments. One person said: "Can we pay respect to this man who browsed the internet heavily just to find the origin of this 'S'?", while another added: "Thank you so much for this ... The universal S is a one-of-a-kind symbol! We all drew it at some point in our lives!"

Zahna Eklund

Print page

Comments:

comments powered by Disqus