Strange, but true—it seems the birth of the now ubiquitous “@” symbol was 473 years ago—May 4, 1536. We know it as the “at” symbol, used to locate people to send them messages with internet speed across cyberspace. But according the The New York Times tech blog, Italians call a “snail,” and south Slavs know it as a “monkey”.
The symbol appeared in a letter written 473 years ago by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi, which was rediscovered in 2000 by Giorgio Stabile, who was then a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Rome.
Francesco Lapi’s letter was sent from Spain to Italy and described the cargo on three ships that had just returned from Latin America. Although Lapi used it to mean “amphora,” an ancient measure of weight or volume, the Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” (thankfully still using the letter “a”). In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba.
The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into English commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of”, and was transferred over to computer keyboards, so that it was ready in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail. As Mr. Tomlinson himself has explained in a description of that first e-mail:
“I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. I used the at sign to indicate that the user was “at” some other host rather than being local.”
Whatever you call it, @ gets your message to you with internet speed!
Tags: Internet Speed