The "@" symbol as it appears on every modern keyboard
In English it’s referred to as the “at” or “ape tail”; the “arroba” in Spanish; the “chiocciola” in Italian. The Germans call it a “monkey’s tail,” and the Chinese “little mouse.” The Russians think of it as a dog, and the Finns as a slumbering cat. The ”@” symbol, the ubiquitous presence in electronic or “e” mail is easy to overlook in the course of our daily Internet correspondence; but although there are disagreements to its precise origin, its central role in modern communication had utilitarian, if not somewhat random, beginnings. We do know it first appeared on a typewriter – an American Underwood - in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.”
According to Yaelf.com, which is devoted to English language history, “That the @ symbol finally became part of cyberspace is due to Ray Tomlinson, an American engineer who is one of the founding fathers of the Internet, or actually the Arpanet [at Beranek, Brown and Newman], the predecessor to the present Internet. [In 1971] Tomlinson invented a system for individual electronic mail, introducing the first “hot” application of the Arpanet. He used the @ symbol to distinguish a sender’s or addressee’s name from the name of the electronic mail box. According to Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history at Rome’s La Sapienza university, Tomlinson chose this symbol “just because it was on the keyboard.”
Noticing that the symbol sat obscurely on the keyboard for all of those intervening years, Tomlinson wanted something that would indicate that the user was “at” an actual computer writing out a message. Another theory, apocryphal perhaps, has suggested Tomlinson selected the “@” in less than a minute of consideration.
Now that the Internet and email have become commercial, if not cultural touchstones in our society, the “@” symbol has inexorably captured the attention of design scholars and enthusiasts. The New York Times this week ran a story about the symbol’s inclusion in New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Collection. According to the Times, there are at least a tandem of reasons for this:
First, both the old and new @ fulfill the same function of simplifying and clarifying something that’s fiendishly complicated to make and interpret: handwritten script and computer code respectively. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, describes that as “an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy.” Both qualities are prized by MoMA, especially “economy” in a time of recession and environmental crisis, when reinventing something that’s under-used seems much smarter than designing something new.
Timeliness matters to MoMA too, and the new @ is timely not only in its economy but also precisely because it is not physical (just like equally dynamic areas of contemporary design such as software and social design). “MoMA’s collection has always been in touch with its time,” Ms. Antonelli said, “and design these days is often an act with aesthetic and ethical consequences, not necessarily a physical object.”
In conclusion, the hastily considered selection of the “@” symbol, which at the time represented a practical response to a communications need, has, with its elevation to almost mythological status, impacted not only our daily lives, but our aesthetic conscience. It excels not only in form and function, but according to the MoMA, also embodies the values of clarity, honesty and simplicity that MoMA considers essential to good design. As a personal note, in the early 1990s, I purchased a “Swatch” watch that includes a big red “@” on a white field. Timely, indeed, in a very literal sense.
