For the servicemen who had returned home from the war only to be spat upon, a traditional memorial would have rung hollow. Most war monuments are about the leader and glorious statements about victory, rather than the lives lost. This began to change with World War I, whose memorials in France listed the names of ordinary soldiers lost in the war. Those monuments inspired Maya Lin when, as a 21-year-old architecture student, she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a final project for a class.

Her goal in the design was not to make a statement about the war, but to be honest about death. She cut into the earth to create an edge, a mirror of polished black granite to reflect both the world we are a part of, and the “quieter, darker, more peaceful world” beyond. The names of the dead were carved chronologically, not alphabetically, allowing a veteran to find his or her own tour of duty on the wall, and touch the names of those who died beside him.

It was unlike anything else before it. It is a miracle that it was ever built. It’s a rare opportunity in our culture to approach the veil, the mystery of death, without fanfare or overbearing messages about What It Means, or what happens to us after.

“In November 1982, I was in tears watching these men welcoming themselves home after almost ten years of not being acknowledged by their country for their service, their sacrifice.”
– Maya Lin

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Special thanks to Andrée Bober for suggesting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Links:

• (PDF) Making the Memorial - Maya Lin, New York Review of Books, November 2000

• Vietnam Veterans Memorial - National Parks Service

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It looked like a superhero suit. One leg covered, one leg visible: it turned her spectacular body into a trademark, instantly recognizable from a distance. It demanded that we look at every inch of it, every inch of her. And we were transfixed, watching her fly.

Florence Griffith-Joyner—Flo-Jo—had always loved fashion. Growing up in Watts, she’d convinced her high school teammates to wear tights under their running shorts. As an adult, she designed her own running uniforms. These were no sponsor’s products.

She memorably ran in the 1988 Olympic trials wearing a white lace catsuit, but it was the one-legged unitard she unveiled that year that became iconic. Her subtraction of that leg of fabric resulted in more, not less. Elite track and field had always emphasized unvarnished athletic achievement—whatever flashy pyrotechnics were going on, they were all internal. They didn’t come flying brazenly, joyfully, smiling down the homestretch. Flo-Jo was too flamboyant for what we thought of as “serious” athletic greatness.

But when she set world records in both the 100 and 200 meters in 1988—records that stand to this day—her greatness was undeniable. Or was it? Suspicions of doping dogged her during her spectacular Olympic year and throughout the following decade, though she never tested positive. When she died unexpectedly of an epileptic seizure at 38, an autopsy found no evidence of steroid use.

The first thing she said after she won the 100 meters at the 1988 Olympics was, “I just thank God that it’s over.”

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Links:

• Flo-Jo Took Street Style and Ran with It – Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1998

• Olympic Legend Florence ‘Flo-Jo’ Joyner’s Iconoclast Outfits and Style on the Track – Julia Teti, Women’s Wear Daily, August 6, 2024

• Enhanced Games 2025 - Wikipedia

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What does it mean to hang onto a piece of a person’s body after they’re gone? If I had Benjamin Franklin’s tooth, I would keep it, make a pretty case for it—maybe in the shape of an acorn, the seed of a great man. I would cherish such an object, or at least keep it as a curiosity. Wouldn’t you?

But—why? Why do we keep sacred relics? That’s what this is, no different from any saint’s kneecap in a church in Europe. This is a sacred relic, and how ironic—the brilliant, eccentric Enlightenment thinker who wasn’t religious, the Freemason—here he is, or here’s his molar anyway. Even if we don’t genuflect in front of it, there’s nonetheless a sense of reverent, albeit morbid curiosity.

Franklin, with his sly wit, would doubtless be amused that we’re here, considering his tooth—his tooth!—in the collection of the American Philosophical Society, which he founded. He would appreciate the joke.

And yet there’s another Franklin: the irreligious man who nevertheless prayed daily to “the Infinite.” There’s the man who would see the magic in this, from his mouth to our eyes across the centuries. Franklin carried this tooth throughout his long and eventful life, through dinners, debates, ocean crossings, experiments, flirtations, and treaties. Conjuring the country from thin air. This bit of him was right there, so close to his thoughts, through all of it. And so we keep it as a souvenir. Which seems right.

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Links:

• American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia, PA

• See footnote below about Franklin’s writing on faith.

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Note:

Franklin’s 1728 “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” an early writing, sets out an Enlightenment liturgy that tacitly does not acknowledge Christianity. As of this writing (May 21, 2026), the Library of Congress website includes an absurdly brief, partial transcription from the manuscript, just the first line of it: “I Believe there is one Supreme most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves.” The public should be trusted to handle the full text, which is not available on the LOC’s website. It is, however, available elsewhere, and it’s a full-throated, beautiful statement of faith, albeit a statement of doubt about some tenets of organized religion:

“In as much as by Reason of our Ignorance We cannot be Certain that many Things Which we often hear mentioned in the Petitions of Men to the Deity, would prove REAL GOODS if they were in our Possession, and as I have Reason to hope and believe that the Goodness of my Heavenly Father will not withold from me a suitable Share of Temporal Blessings, if by a VIRTUOUS and HOLY Life I merit his Favour and Kindness.”

The Buffalo nickel was already nostalgic for the disappearing frontier when it entered circulation in 1913. Sculptor James Earle Fraser was best known for The End of the Trail, an elegiac portrait of a Native American rider pushed to the continent’s edge. His design for the new nickel was sculptural, more like a medallion than a coin: thick, with raised relief and striking imagery. Made of soft metal, it was ideal for carving.

During the Great Depression, Buffalo nickels circulated in the hundreds of millions. Hobos began carving them by hand, working the profile into bearded drifters, derby-hatted men, bartenders, gamblers, or clowns. These itinerant workers could walk into almost any rail-yard commissary or boarding house and pick up a blank canvas for five cents. As with other tramp art, the carvers of hobo nickels had time on their hands and little else.

Most of them never signed their work; most were self-taught. A few were genuinely skilled engravers—sign painters, jewelers, or tradesmen who had fallen on hard times. Depression-era hobo nickels range from crudely scratched profiles to fully modeled relief carvings.

Their makers traded coins for meals, a night’s shelter, or passage to the next town, in unrecorded exchanges that were part of a larger survival economy. Originals scattered widely, often spent at face value by people who didn’t know what they were holding. A recent revival has seen contemporary hobo nickels of extraordinary precision and sophistication. But the Depression-era originals carry a poignancy more valuable than money.

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Special thanks to Julie Kinzelman for suggesting the Buffalo nickel, which led to the hobo nickel.

Links:

• Original vs Modern Hobo Nickels - HoboNickels.org

• Hobo Nickels - American Numismatic Association

• Luis Jimenez, The End of the Trail (with Electric Sunset)

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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Four notes on the transistor:

1. Its influence cannot be overstated. Nobody could have imagined how it would transform human life. Its announcement in the New York Times was brief, buried deep in the paper. Yet every electronic experience passes through transistors, tiny switches that turn electricity on and off. Today, a single chip contains hundreds of billions of them.

2. It all came from quantum mechanics. Solid matter turned out to be far stranger than it appears. We knew that metal conducted electricity, but quantum mechanics in the 1920s revealed that certain crystals—especially silicon—could be made to control electricity itself. The digital age emerged from manipulating those crystals at the quantum level.

3. It was shared generously. Management at Bell Labs was afraid that the military would classify the transistor, or that the Justice Department would begin antitrust proceedings. Their response was strategic preemptive openness—they created a liberal licensing program, seeding the information so widely and fast that classification became moot. For $25,000, companies including GE, RCA, and then-small firms like Sony and Texas Instruments received a license and a crash course.

4. Human egos got in the way. The history of the transistor is soaked with resentment and rivalry. William Shockley quit Bell Labs to found a rival outfit, which itself lost eight young scientists, the “traitorous eight,” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor—the seed of Silicon Valley. New laws of matter do not imply new laws of human nature. The transistor changed everything except us.

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Special thanks to Peter Wallace for suggesting the transistor.

Links:

• Transistorized! - PBS, 1999: “The story of clashing egos and top secret research.”

• 1952: Bell Labs Licenses Transistor Technology – Computer History Museum

• “The News of Radio” – New York Times, July 1, 1948, p. 46, column 3.

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People knew something was coming. The mountain had been dormant since the 1850s, but in March 1980, small earthquakes—an “earthquake swarm”—began to signal its awakening from hibernation. Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray declared a state of emergency, creating a “red zone” around the volcano.

But the politics of the red zone were fraught. Weyerhaeuser was logging nearby and lobbied hard to maintain access. Owners of nearby cabins fought to visit their properties. Scientists knew an eruption was likely, but they couldn’t predict that the mountain would explode sideways.

The danger zone proved far too small. On the morning of May 18, 1980, the north face of Mount St. Helens collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history, uncorking a lateral blast that released 24 megatons of thermal energy, the equivalent of 1,600 Hiroshima bombs. The explosion snapped trees 10 feet in diameter like matchsticks. It killed 57 people, most of whom were outside the red zone.

Harry R. Truman, the best-known holdout on Spirit Lake, refused to leave his lodge. When the mountain erupted, the lake surged in a 600-foot tsunami, burying the surrounding area beneath avalanche debris. Neither Truman nor his lodge was ever found.

Surveying the damage, President Carter said, “Someone said this area looked like a moonscape, but the moon looks like a golf course compared to what’s up there.” 46 years later, the blast zone is a patchwork of new habitats—thriving frogs, lupines, and pocket gophers where old-growth forest once stood.

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Links:

• How a Team of Gophers Restored Mount St. Helens With Less Than a Day of Digging - Alexa Robles-Gil, Smithsonian Magazine, November 14, 2024

• Mistakes Led to Needless Deaths From Worst Volcanic Blast - Simon Worrall, National Geographic, March 20, 2016

• Robert Landsburg, The Photographer Who Spent His Final Moments Documenting The Eruption Of Mount St. Helens - Genevieve Carlton, All That’s Interesting, March 7, 2024

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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How can such a tiny, bland little thing have such a wild origin story? It’s just a flake. Of corn. And yet Corn Flakes emerged from religious fervor and bitter lawsuits.

There were two brothers, John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg. One was a doctor, and one was a capitalist. J.H. was charitable and eccentric; at his Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, patients were denied meat, alcohol, coffee, and tobacco. Bland food, he believed, could quiet dangerous appetites, including what he viewed as the sin of masturbation. Corn Flakes were invented as a weapon against desire. But J.H. had no interest in marketing his breakfast invention. He considered it a sin to profit off his cereal.

Will Keith—W.K.—had no such qualms. Taciturn and austere, he dragged his brother through a five-year legal battle, wrested control of the Kellogg name, and got to work advertising. His company became hugely profitable. He put his son in charge, then forced him and his successors out. In 1930, he gave a majority interest in the company to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world.

Battle Creek became the cereal capital of the world, as former patients like C.W. Post launched rival breakfast empires. But Kellogg’s flake contained a paradox: the cereal was intentionally designed to be easily digestible, which means it turns to sugar in the bloodstream almost immediately. The breakfast invented as a health food spawned America’s processed, sugary start to the day.

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Links:

• The Secret Ingredient in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Is Seventh-Day Adventism – Howard Markel, Smithsonian Magazine, July 28, 2017

• The Battle of the Cornflakes – Richard Cavendish, History Today, February 2, 2006

• The Strange Story Behind Your Breakfast Cereal – Matthew Wills, JStor Daily, February 26, 2019

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The gun is strange. It’s like a child’s stick, an elongated appendage that extends from the bearer over 4 feet. It’s also dead elegant, its slender wood stock often embellished with engraved brass or silver. In the hands of a marksman, it could kill a man 300 yards away. Daniel Boone carried a long rifle he christened “The Tick Licker,” because he claimed it could shoot a tick off the rump of an animal without harming its hide.

The Kentucky Rifle was from Pennsylvania, not Kentucky. German immigrants, master craftsmen, arrived at the edge of the map in the early 1700s. They adapted the Jäger, a hunting rifle made for the field, to the forest. It was lighter, longer, smaller-caliber—its extended barrel made it the most accurate weapon on the frontier. For many colonists, knowing how to use one determined whether they ate, lived, or died.

The American Revolution was a bring-your-own-gun affair, and many frontiersmen joined the fight. European warfare emphasized mass formation and collective fire—the smooth-bore English musket was inaccurate at long range but could fill open fields with smoke and lead.

But a rifleman could melt into the wooded terrain as a terrifying, invisible sharpshooter. One British officer described him as “some great spirit of death.” The long rifle elevated the individual marksman, who eventually morphed into the lone hunter, scout, and sniper in the American imagination. And this exquisitely handcrafted folk art was our most precise killing technology for over a century.

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Links:

• The Kentucky Rifle: How America’s Famous Frontier Long Gun Changed Warfare – John Danielski, Military History Now, May 4, 2020

• Kentucky’s Corps of Longriflemen

• Rifles and Groove-bored Muskets in the American Revolution – Harry Schenawolf, Revolutionary War Journal, July 18, 2015 (via the Internet Archive)

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It went like this: kids came home from school, changed clothes, and took off on their bikes. Were they going to the park, to a friend’s house, to the five-and-dime store? Who knew? They were popping wheelies, riding free. Parents trusted they’d be home when they needed to, by dark, by dinner time. And they were.

The bikes emerged out of West Coast motorcycle culture. After WWII, returning veterans had bought up surplus military bikes and stripped them down—removing fenders, cutting frames, raking the front forks out long and low. The look was less about speed, more about stance and style. By the 60s, black paint was out, and candy-colored, metal-flaked choppers glittered in the California sunshine.

Local kids started applying the same logic to their bicycles. Elongated banana seats looked low and cool, with a rear support hoop that was just like a motorcycle sissy bar. Huge, ape-hanger handlebars completed the translation from the machines in the driveway.

In 1963, Schwinn designer Al Fritz went to California, saw what the kids were doing, copied it, cleaned it up, and sold his company on the idea. The Sting-Ray hit stores that year. By the end of the decade, its glitter vinyl banana seat was like a disco ball you sat on, and tassels streamed from the handlebars. Sold in colors like Flamboyant Lime, Radiant Coppertone, and Kool Lemon, it was less a bicycle than a child-sized chopper, the first swagger for a generation of American kids.

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Special thanks to Julie Kinzelman for suggesting the Schwinn Sting-Ray.

Links:

• History of the Schwinn Sting-Ray - bikehistory.org

• The History of the Schwinn Sting-Ray and Krates - Schwinn

• 1965 Super Deluxe Sting-Ray Schwinn Bicycle – National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

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After the Civil War, the US Army created six all-black regiments, a tenth of the total force. These soldiers were disproportionately sent West, into terrain where temperatures could drop to 50 below zero, without adequate winter supplies. So they found their own.

The Army never officially adopted buffalo coats as standardized cold-weather gear, but they were ubiquitous in the West. For millennia, Native tribes had worn robes made from buffalo hides. White explorers on the Lewis and Clark expedition coveted the robes, and they were quickly adopted by fur traders and scouts. But buffalo coats are perhaps most obviously associated with the Buffalo Soldiers, the black army regiments who wore them on the western frontier.

The origin of the name is debated, although everyone agrees it was bestowed by Plains tribes. The troops themselves considered the name high praise. As the Army moved West along with the country, Buffalo Soldiers did much of the work that made westward expansion possible: fighting in the Indian Wars, battling cattle thieves and other outlaws, and protecting settlers crossing the frontier.

In winter photographs, the soldiers appear in enormous fur robes, the shaggy buffalo hides thrown over dark uniforms against the snow. It was resourceful improvisation; as George H.W. Bush said in 1992, Buffalo Soldiers “often received the worst food and equipment and labored without the respect and recognition that were their due.” But the stiff, heavy furs became part of their legend, inseparable from the hard frontier reputation that earned them their name.

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Links:

• Buffalo Soldiers - National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Three Things to Know About the Buffalo Soldiers – Kat Eschner, Smithsonian Magazine, July 28, 2017

• Presidential Proclamation 6461—Buffalo Soldiers Day, 1992

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The first radio transmission was in 1901, and the first powered flight in 1903. But it would be another 25 years before radio navigation for airplanes became viable or widespread. During that interim, pilots navigated visually using roads, mountains, and rivers during the day. Night flying was dangerous, but when the US Postal Service established air mail, it needed pilots to fly at night. A simple, analog solution emerged: the USPS built beacon towers every 10 miles, with huge concrete arrows painted yellow on the ground that pointed towards the next beacon. Alone in open cockpits, pilots would hop from pool of light to pool of light through the darkness, following the arrows across deserts and plains.

By 1933, some 1,500 beacons marked 18,000 miles of routes across the nation. But this massive national system was already obsolete after only nine years. It was abandoned in place; the towers were eventually torn down for World War II scrap metal. Many of the concrete arrows were also demolished, but hundreds remain scattered across the country. Enthusiasts have mapped them on websites from the 2010s, which themselves feel antiquated.

Those websites’ images of cracked and weathered concrete arrows in uninhabited landscapes are haunting: 70-foot markers pointing to unknown horizons for reasons we no longer remember. Gigantic signs designed to be seen from above, from a perspective we’d only recently acquired, they’re the Stonehenge of a young country—mysterious monuments forgotten in a single lifetime.

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Links:

• The True Story Behind Those Giant Concrete Arrows – Lauren Walser, National Trust for Historic Preservation, July 16, 2015

• 126 Concrete Arrow Photos - Arrows Across America

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She wasn’t like the other TV wives. She was ridiculous, impulsive, made poor decisions—and also generous, loving, and loyal. A wholly formed human being. American audiences loved her. In its first season, I Love Lucy was watched by 67% of TV households every Monday night.

But when she became pregnant, CBS was appalled. Not a whiff of sexual content was permitted on air—married couples had to appear sleeping in separate beds, and even the word “pregnant” could not be spoken. The studio lamely proposed hiding Lucy‘s condition, having her sit behind chairs or tables. It was Desi Arnaz who insisted on reality, on something that had never been done before: incorporating Lucy’s real-life pregnancy into the script. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s true: a priest, a minister, and a rabbi were asked to read the script and give it their blessing. They did, without changing a word. Lucy still couldn’t be described as pregnant, but “expecting” was permissible, which Desi deliberately mispronounced as “spectin.”

For the first time, a popular TV show acknowledged the humor, ridiculousness, and discomfort of pregnancy. Audiences watched Lucy get huge, saw her comically struggle to get out of a chair in her ballooning tent blouse, and saw, in a scene of uproarious, farcical slapstick, the rush to the hospital—an episode that was watched by more people than Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day. The public performance of pregnancy, in entertainment and real life, would never be the same.

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Links:

• How I Love Lucy Changed How America Saw Motherhood – Daniel Levy, TIME, May 8, 2021

• Why We Still Love Lucy – interview with author Kathleen Brady, PBS American Experience, October 2017

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This entry is in honor of the 25th anniversary of Glasstire, the online magazine of Texas visual art I founded in 2001. The site’s name is an homage to the Texan-born artist Robert Rauschenberg.

In person, Robert Rauschenberg had an easy warmth and humor. Speaking of his use of taxidermy animals in his seminal combines of the 1950s and 60s, he said, “I always thought ‘it’s too bad they’re dead,’ and so I thought, ‘I can do something about that.’”

Who knows how the spectacular angora goat ended up in a secondhand furniture store on Seventh Avenue, but when he saw it, Rauschenberg knew he had to have it. He paid $15, took it home and got to work. It took him four years to find the solution. Initially he mounted the goat up against the painting, but he said the goat refused to be abstracted into art: “It looked like art with a goat.”

It wasn’t until he hit upon the idea of encircling the goat with a tire and placing the painting on the floor as a kind of platform that the object resolved. The remarkable creature could be seen in the round, as it demanded. But the addition of the tire around its body elevated the piece beyond mere found object. Rauschenberg publicly insisted the work had no meaning, saying “a stuffed goat is special in the way a stuffed goat is special.” But critics have read the tire as a halo, a wedding ring, and a sex act, among many other interpretations. Despite all the theories, despite its outsized influence on American art, viewers still first encounter Monogram as an irreducible, animate presence, a dead goat saved from death.

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Links:

• Monogram - Moderrna Museet, Stockholm

• Monogram - Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

• Rauschenberg and the most celebrated goat in art history – Simon Wilson, Royal Academy, November 30, 2016

• Combines - Rauschenberg Foundation

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Duct tape—or is it duck tape, which is it?—is the quintessential scrappy, do-it-all American tool. It saved the Apollo 13 astronauts from suffocating in space, solving the square-peg-in-a-round-hole problem 200,000 miles from Earth. When NASA engineer Ed Smylie learned duct tape was on board, he later said, “I felt like we were home free.”

Originally olive green, the fabric-backed tape—designed to be waterproof and easily torn in the field—was used to seal WWII ammunition cases. It was called duck tape during the war, although it’s unclear whether because of the canvas duck fabric, or because water flowed off it like a duck’s back. As with most things duct tape, the lore is better than the practical application.

After the war, the tape became gray to match the HVAC ductwork contractors wrapped with it and the name morphed—again, nobody knows quite how or when—into “duct tape.”1 Here the tape’s shortcomings became apparent: applied to real-life ductwork, the tape fails completely within months. Heat degrades the adhesive; cold makes it brittle; moisture renders it useless. A Lawrence Berkeley researcher put it plainly: “Of all the things we tested, only duct tape failed. It failed reliably and often quite catastrophically.”

But even though we’ve all experienced a duct tape fail, it nonetheless enjoys a reputation as a near-supernatural problem solver, beloved by hobbyists for everything from home repairs to craft projects. The greatest improvisation tool ever made is useless for the one job its name promises.

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Special thanks to Steve Satterwhite for suggesting duct tape.

Links:

• Duct Tape and Determination: Ed Smylie’s Apollo 13 Heroics – gekko, Mary 19, 2025

• Duct Tape Auto Repair on the Moon – Max Campbell, National Air and Space Museum, August 31, 2015

• 10 Duct Tape Hacks That Are Worth A Try – Jahaira Arthur, House Digest, January 8, 2024

• Berkeley Lab report: Advanced Duct Sealant Testing (PDF)

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For 230 years, the gleaming white church has appeared to float above the desert like a mirage, its lime plaster glowing against the horizon. San Xavier del Bac, just south of Tucson, looks—as it was designed to—otherworldly.

Of all the Spanish mission churches in the United States, San Xavier del Bac is arguably the most beautiful. It’s also unbalanced and strange. A structure designed by Franciscans, an order that demands poverty, celebrates the faith with ornate, theatrical splendor. A Catholic church in the American Southwest feels faintly Moroccan.

Built by the O’odham tribe, which uses it to this day, the church’s stark, whitewashed walls contrast sharply with the elaborate interior, every inch of which appears to be encrusted with hand-carved and gilded statuary and motifs. It is a spectacular example of the Mexican Baroque style.

The Franciscans ran out of money for the project—the east tower was never completed—and by the mid-1800s, the mission had largely been abandoned by the church. In 1858, four years after the United States acquired what is now Southern Arizona, an Anglo visitor wrote, “The birds are its only occupants and they sing praises from morning until night. They build their nests on the heads of the saints and warble their notes of joy while perched on their fingers.” But the O’odham never left; the church has been their parish throughout. Today one of their own, a conservator trained in Rome, tends the church his ancestors built alongside his Spanish wife.

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Links:

• Great article by Mark Lipczynski about the conservation of the church: Preservation Magazine, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Summer 2021

• San Xavier del Bac Mission – National Fund for Sacred Places

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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All good ideas seem so obvious in retrospect that we cannot remember life before them. This is certainly true of what is possibly the most frequently knocked-off design of the 20th century.

It was 1976, and New York badly needed to change its reputation as a crime-ridden, hostile and near-bankrupt city. They needed a tourism campaign! The state hired agency Wells Rich Greene, who came up with the phrase “I Love New York.” Designer Milton Glaser was tapped to come up with a visual equivalent for the words, something punchy and memorable. His design was approved.

A week later, doodling in the back of a taxicab and thinking about Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, Glaser was hit with a better idea. “Forget it,” a state official said, “Do you know how complicated it would be to get everybody together to approve it again?” Glaser implored. The official came down to the office, nodded, took away the new sketch, and had it approved.

This simple typographic puzzle collapses words into a graphic that reads directly as emotion. It’s become so instantly recognizable, so much a part of the vernacular, it’s hard to imagine that it was actually designed by someone. That it didn’t always exist.

Glaser donated his services, never imagining his design would last longer than a few weeks. He never received royalties. As with all great ideas, he could not fully explain it, saying, “Why and how this ever came about is a mystery to me.”

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Links:

• Milton Glaser, I Heart NY Concept Sketch - Museum of Modern Art

• What You Don’t Know About Milton Glaser’s “I ♥ NY” – Steven Brower, AIGA Eye on Design, February 12, 2015

• Robert Indiana, LOVE

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!

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This is the weekly recap of The American 250, featuring objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

For instructions on receiving a daily email instead, click here.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!