Today's useless fact

Where did the peace sign originate?

The peace sign: U.S. President Richard Nixon used the 'victory sign' (a hand gesture in which the first and second fingers are raised and parted, whilst the remaining fingers are clenched) during the Vietnam War to connotate victory, an act which became one of his best-known trademarks. The victory sign was appropriated by the anti-war protesters as a peace gesture, thus becoming the 'peace sign.'

The peace symbol: The peace symbol was designed and completed February 21, 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a commercial designer and artist in Britain. He had been commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to design a symbol for use at an Easter march to Canterbury Cathedral in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England.

The symbol itself is a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D", standing for Nuclear Disarmament. In semaphore the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an upside-down "V", and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down. These two signals imposed over each other form the shape of the peace symbol. In the original design the lines widened at the edge of the circle.

A conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War, Holtom later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater depth: "I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."

The fact that symbol resembles a bird's foot in a circle gave rise to alternative interpretations, ranging from plain mockery of "crow's foot" and "American Chicken" (a right wing hint that peace is for cowards) to a number of occult meanings from conspiracy theorists, since a crow or a raven is a gloomy bird in various mythologies.

The far-right John Birch Society has referred to it as a "broken cross" – accusing the peace movement of repudiating Christ. It has also been called a relative of the Nazi swastika – or the rune algiz inverted, said to mean "hidden danger". It resembles the rune calc.