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The Biography of a Symbol

The few linguistic studies that have been devoted to the hashtag make a point of stressing its categorial novelty as a linguistic element. In their current usage, according to Paola-Maria Caleffi, hashtags are "linguistic items whose identity does not match any part of speech in the traditional sense of the term." Oscillating between text and metadata, between signifying and networking, hashtags "are both words and not yet words."15 More detailed information about the special nature of this symbol can perhaps be provided by its history. Where did # first appear? In what contexts did it acquire its meaning, and on what platforms did it secure its status as a fixed element of typography?

In American English, as mentioned above, the symbol is known as a "number sign" or "pound sign" (which is the term used by Messina in his tweet). These terms already offer a few hints about the symbol's early applications. Both uses began to appear in printed books around the middle of the nineteenth century, with the prefixed # designating "number" (e.g., #10) and the suffixed # designating "pound" as a unit of weight (e.g., 10#).16 This latter use, according to Keith Houston, provides "the most credible story behind the evolution of the symbol."17 It is the story of a centuries-long transformation that resulted in the stabilization of sloppy writing practices. For a long time, the Latin term libra or libra pondo "a pound by weight" was abbreviated as lb in ledgers, recipes, delivery orders, and contracts. This abbreviation entered the English language in the late Middle Ages, and it was then often written, according to a common scribal practice at the time, with a line crossing through its top to mark it as a contraction (). The symbol continued to be used in written documents through the seventeenth century, even by Isaac Newton himself.18 According to historians of typography, the transition from to # was a process of ongoing refinement; in manuscripts from the nineteenth century, for instance, the pound sign already appears as a standardized crosshatch in notes written by accountants, cooks, and pharmacists. Over time, a single symbol emerged out of two lower-case letters with a line crossing through them, and became a common feature in printed books by the second half of the nineteenth century.

Of course, additional applications of the symbol are not hard to come across: editors use it when proof-reading to indicate that a space should be inserted in a text; physicians use it as shorthand to denote a bone fracture; and it is used in chess notation to denote a checkmate (here it is thus a symbol of interruption and not, like the hashtag, a symbol of connection). These areas of use, however, are limited to specific professions or technical language. In musical notation, the "sharp sign" has a slightly different form and is regarded as an independent typographical element - instead of #. In the United States, at least, the symbol mostly meant "pound" or "number," and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century it became a standard typewriter key. First produced in 1878, the Remington 2 typewriter introduced the arrangement of letters, numbers, and symbols that, at a conference of stenographers held in Toronto in 1888, would be declared the "universal keyboard," which has remained almost unchanged to this day. Here the # symbol was located, as it is still located on American keyboards, above the number 3 on the upper left.19

For the subsequent career of the pound/hash sign, its inclusion on the universal keyboard was important because, at least in the United States, the # element became part of the most exclusive typographical inventory. Aside from numbers and letters, the Remington 2 keyboard contains just a dozen punctuation marks and special signs. This canonical status was then perpetuated in the early twentieth century by the development of new devices and methods for data processing, such as the standardization of the punch card system, which IBM patented in 1928 and which includes # among its 80 letters, numbers, and symbols. Media-historical references such as these are significant because appeals to tradition happened to play a decisive role in the development of the very communication device that would make the hash sign a familiar symbol in Europe as well: the touch-tone telephone.

In 1963, the American company AT&T introduced the first telephone that, instead of having the customary rotary dial, functioned with a ten-button keypad arranged in a three-by-three matrix of numbers, with the 0 placed below the 8 in a fourth row. The change from the rotary dial, which had been introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the new dialing system may have offered customers greater comfort, but it was primarily motivated by a technical reason. Tone dialing, after all, made it possible to send a signal directly to the addressed apparatus instead of having to go through the nearest telephone exchange, which had been the case with the pulse-dialing system of rotary phones. This technical change increased the networking capabilities of individual telephones, which could now be connected to external devices such as answering machines or to the computer systems in government agencies, banks, and corporations. With tone dialing, it would essentially be possible to spy on conversations, receive computerized wake-up calls, and transfer money by entering a credit card number.

In the first design of the touch-tone telephone, however, these ancillary applications were not available for everyday use because, among other things, it lacked a way to confirm when a caller had finished punching in a series of numbers. Since the early 1960s, however, researchers at AT&T had been working on adjusting the telephone's design to the newly available signal technology. Prototypes were installed in hospitals and offices, and in 1968 the company presented its new model, the "Western Electric 2500," which had two additional buttons in the fourth row of its keypad, one under the number 7 and the other under the number 9. The star sign (*) and the hash sign became standard features of the touch-tone telephone, which has been the standard phone in every American household since the 1970s and in every household in Europe since the middle of the 1980s.

Douglas Kerr, a former telecommunications engineer at AT&T who contributed to the development of the touch-tone telephone, has written two blog posts about how the two new signs were chosen and named. "There had long been interest," he recalls, "in the introduction of 'codes' beyond those for the 10 digits that could be used as syntactical elements in protocols through which costumers could control emerging new and sophisticated telephone system functions." He also remarks that this development was accelerated by the "emerging relationship between telephone sets and computers."20 The function of the hash sign as one of two non-numerical signs on the keypad was at first to confirm the entry of telephone numbers, account numbers, or credit card numbers - its purpose, that is, was to signal the end of meaningful data and issue a command to send this information.21 Kerr's recollections are especially informative about why the # symbol was chosen at all. In the earliest versions of the 12-button keypad, the input button on the lower right was in fact a diamond sign. Shortly before the Western Electric 2500 was released in 1968, however, the symbol was swapped out on account of a decision that had been made 80 years earlier. Because the diamond sign, according to Kerr, "did not appear on most typewriters, it would be very cumbersome for the administrators of systems for the entry of data from Touch-Tone telephones to prepare instruction sheets or manuals!"22 The hash sign (like the asterisk on the lower left side of the keypad) fulfilled this criterion, but there was some debate at first about what it should be called. For the release of the new telephone, the engineers wanted to devise a new name for the hash sign. One proposal was "octotherp," which refers to the eight free ends of the symbol's four strokes, but this suggestion faced immediate resistance.23 (The word has largely been forgotten by English speakers.)

With the arrival of the touch-tone telephone, the hash sign began to play a generally prominent role in the history of technology. In the words of the media historian Jeff Scheible, it signified "a promise of innovation" in that the button on the lower right of the keypad made it possible to connect every private telephone to a complex network of devices and computer systems.24 "Please enter [this or that number] followed by the pound [or hash] key," a friendly entreaty made by automated telephone systems, is familiar to anyone who owned an answering machine or called a bank or rental car company just ten years ago. Writing in newspapers or magazines, cultural critics have long been bothered by automated forms of communication and by the ousting of real telephone conversations by computerized voices and push buttons. In 2003, for instance, Christian Kämmerling wrote a long, lamenting, and even prophetic article about this process of alienation. The end of his piece, which focuses on...