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Talking Symbols


By Birgitte Wistoft

Trade mark, emblem, profile, identity - in short: a logo. Post and Tele Museum has certainly got one. The exciting and demanding task was solved for us by two young graphic artists, who call themselves 2 Graphic Design.


The result is vivid and untraditional. The name of the museum written in a transistor-inspired frame is the actual logo. It can be used as it is, but the design also comprises four "icons" that may revolve closely around the logo or be lavished on letter paper, labels, and all kinds of printed matters. They are signalling post and telecommunication, speed and intercourse – in the past, present, and future. They are symbols telling stories.

Mercury: Messenger, Merchant – and Thief

The old Greeks called him Hermes. He has a grand genealogical tree in their great world of gods. He was the fruit of a passionate affair between the supreme god Zeus and the goddess Maia. Already as an infant Hermes showed his special talent as a lucky thief. He stole 50 oxen from the god Apollo and by using his charms he even managed to get away with as well the oxen as a number of godsends. Swift and quick-witted, with his magic wand and wings on his travelling hat and boots he became the messenger of the gods. People called upon him for pleasant dreams, good fortune in business as well as in theft, wealth and fertility, as well as a safe journey through life and death.

The Romans named him Mercurius, [in English Mercury]. One of Denmark’s great merchants, Andreas Bjørn (1703-50), used him as a symbol of Copenhagen. For that reason there is a statute of him in front of the Stock Exchange.

In our time when post and telecommunication are regular profit-oriented fields of business it is hardly off the beam to call attention to the messenger of the old gods as also the symbol and protector of communication.

The Telephone

The telephone in Post & Tele Museum’s new logo is model 1904. Among the vast variety of early telephone models it is striking that right from the start this was the model that became the most popular with the Danish telephone companies. Only the attached logo indicated the identity of the local company. It was incredibly hard-wearing. In countless Danish feature productions the actors make use of the 1904 model. Even until the end of the 1960’s it was still found in many Danish homes.

It became the telephone par excellence: a magneto table apparatus consisting of a black metal box with a crank on one side and a cradle with a microtelephone. L.M. Ericsson in Stockholm began to produce this telephone model in 1904. Later the model was produced in different versions by Emil Møller Elektromekaniske Fabrikker [Electromechanical Factories] in Horsens. From 1920, a red button to cause a short-circuit of the bell when calling or ringing off was fitted, and in 1935 it was equipped with a new receiver of bakelite.

It is a constituent part of the logo as a symbol of the greatest technological revolution for ordinary people in the 20th century: The telephone.

The Crowned Post Horn

At least since the 1650’s the post horn has been used as a symbol of the Danish postal service. We inherited it from the south as several South and Central European postal services used post horns already in the 16th century. In Denmark we meet the post horn in many different shapes through the years.

When the Danish telegraph service was established in the middle of the 1850’s, it employed arrows and (later) flashes of lightening to accentuate the speed by which the telegrams were sent. Lightening and arrows were flashing in different ways in the logos which the telegraph service was using.

In 1927 the two services were united in the Post & Telegraph Service and during the next decade several unsuccessful combinations of the logos of the two services were produced. In 1939, the architect Gunnar Biilmann Petersen designed the symbol of P&T with two crossed arrows on the crowned post horn which we know today.

An attempt to modernize this logo in 1974 was "knocked down" by public opinion and the postal service had to confine itself to simplify the symbol to the shape in which it now appears in the museum’s logo.

The @

We call it "at", but we have many names for the things we love. It is one of the characteristics of the computer age and especially e-mails. The strange letter is originally a compilation of "ad" which in Latin means "to" or "at". When the American owner of a computer firm, Dennis C. Hayes, about 1980 laid down a set of commands to control calls via modem he chose @ as a symbol of the English word "attention". Since then the products of the company have become so widespread that the commands are today standard. In Post & Tele Museum’s logo the @ signals modern communication and efficiency.

Footnote:
Guests in the penthouse café of the museum have a unique opportunity of getting eye contact with Mercury. On the housetop opposite he is balancing on the tip of the toe of his winged foot leaning dangerously over Købmagergade with his wand raised and a firm grip on his purse. For more than 100 years he has been standing on the roof of the building which contained the Messen department store until 1971. The antique bronze god with full speed ahead is made by sculptor Julius Schultz in 1896. The museum of communication could not ask for a more suitable neighbour.


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