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Where does the peace symbol come from? |
There are lots of symbols for peace! One of the most famous is that circle that has an upside-down Y inside it with a line down the middle. The man who designed it was Gerald Holtom. He made it to be used by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (or CND) in Great Britain. The CND’s goal was—and still is—to get all countries to stop making and get rid of weapons of mass destruction, like nuclear bombs, which can hurt a lot of people. Gerald Holtom thought the CND would be more successful if they had a symbol, or a picture, for their cause, and in 1958, he came up with what we now know as the peace symbol.
The symbol isn’t just random lines in a circle. It’s actually letters. There’s a special alphabet that uses flags to stand for letters. It’s called flag semaphore. He took the flag positions for the letters N (for nuclear) and D (for disarmament) and put them together. The circle that they are in symbolizes the Earth! Originally the symbol was used to protest making big bombs, but today the symbol stands for peace of any kind.
Flag Formation!
There are many different alphabets. There’s the 26-letter English alphabet, there is the American Sign Language alphabet, and there is the flag semaphore alphabet that Gerald Holtom used to make the peace sign. It’s a pretty cool alphabet because you hold flags in your hand and stretch your arms in different directions to make letters that can be seen from far away. Try it at home!
There is a link to the alphabet in the link list below. See if you can spell your name. Then, find the letters N and D and see how they came together to form the peace symbol.
