The S We All Knew Growing Up.

It’s the S we all most likely drew at some point growing up:

But what is it called and where did it come from? Well, the first question is relatively simple to answer

The official name for this S is “Cool S’ and as to where it comes from, that’s a bit more complicated

Set of Cool S (Super S) doodles, kids school notebook drawings. Vector clip art illustration.

A Swedish Redditor recently attempted to answer that very question and ended up going down a rabbit hold trying to trace the origins of the cool S. In the end he spent 5 years looking for where it came from. The cool S has appeared in Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Greece, Germany, France, South Africa, Iceland and many more. At one stage it was thought the S was created by the clothing company Stussy in the 90s. However, Stussy themselves have said the symbol predates them. Another possibility is that the S is a simplified version of the Japanese carmaker Suzuki’s logo which was created in 1958. However, it turns out the cool S i s way older than that. After extensive research the Swedish Redditor traced the first known use of the symbol all the way back to the 1890s in a magazine called Mechanical Graphics by a man named Fredrick Newton Wilson

The speculation is that Wilson who taught geometry “might have taught his students this neat trick on how to draw a symmetrical S”.

There you have it, over the following years, more and more students especially picked up on the cool S until it has become an almost universal symbol