Home » Latest » TRENDING NOW » The Universal S

The Universal S

6

102 0 TRENDING NOW

8.6

SaveSavedRemoved 2

A doodle every kid on earth seems to know how to draw, and nobody can say where it came from.

Swedish YouTuber David Wångstedt, better known as LEMMiNO, spent five years chasing down the origin of the 14-line “Cool S” — the pointy, angular squiggle that shows up on notebook margins, desks, and backpacks on every continent. His August 2019 video, “The Universal S,” lays out that investigation in full, debunking the internet’s favorite explanations one by one before landing on a lead nobody expected: a 19th-century engineering textbook.

• Wångstedt filtered 1,215 unique reports of the symbol from more than 27,000 online comments and forum threads, with sightings spanning every inhabited continent.
• Personal accounts placed the doodle being drawn as far back as the 1940s, decades before any of the brands commonly credited with inventing it existed.
• The oldest confirmed visual match turned up in Frederick Newton Willson’s 1890 textbook “Mechanical Graphics,” predating Jon Naar’s 1973 photographs of the same symbol spray-painted across New York City.

Knocking Down the Usual Suspects

The Cool S gets attributed to streetwear label Stüssy more than to anything else, but Wångstedt got confirmation straight from company representatives that the doodle was circulating well before Stüssy was founded in the 1980s and was never part of the brand’s actual logo work. Superman’s emblem gets floated too, despite looking nothing like it up close. Suzuki’s 1958 logo comes up in the same conversations, and it doesn’t match either. Thrash metal band Sacred Reich, an ’80s act sometimes credited online, simply formed too late to have originated something already being drawn by kids decades earlier.

Each theory followed the same pattern: a plausible-sounding brand or pop-culture reference that either looked wrong on close inspection or arrived on the timeline too late to be the source. That’s the same kind of theory-by-theory teardown that shows up in deep internet rabbit holes like the Game Theory breakdowns of Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, where the fun is watching a popular fan explanation get systematically dismantled before the real answer shows up.

Crowdsourcing 27,000 Comments

Rather than rely on guesswork, Wångstedt built his case from crowdsourced testimony. Combing through tens of thousands of online comments and forum posts, he narrowed the pile down to 1,215 distinct, credible reports of people drawing or seeing the symbol, sorted by decade and location. The pattern that emerged wasn’t regional — it was global, with independent claims of the doodle surfacing in the 1970s, the 1960s, and, in a handful of accounts, the 1940s.

Sightings on every inhabited continent, sourced from 1,215 filtered reports pulled out of more than 27,000 raw comments.

Photographic Proof in 1970s New York

Testimony only goes so far, so Wångstedt went looking for something you could actually point to. He found it in the archive of Jon Naar, the photographer whose 1973 New York City graffiti shots documented the era’s tagging scene. Buried in those photos is the exact same S, spray-painted on city surfaces years before Stüssy existed and well before any of the pop-culture theories could apply.

Tracing It to an 1890 Engineering Textbook

The earliest hard evidence Wångstedt could locate wasn’t graffiti or a logo at all — it was a diagram. Frederick Newton Willson, a Princeton professor of engineering and geometry, included an almost identical stylized S in his 1890 textbook “Mechanical Graphics,” presented as a theoretical drawing exercise. Wångstedt is careful not to claim Willson invented the doodle kids know today; his conclusion is that the shape likely emerged independently, more than once, as an intuitive geometric exercise anyone with a pencil and a few straight lines could stumble into.

What his research does establish is that the Cool S is older than streetwear branding, older than corporate logo design as most people know it, and older than graffiti culture as commonly discussed — a piece of folklore passed hand to hand across generations with no single author.

Wångstedt closes the video the way he opened it: no definitive inventor, no smoking-gun patent, just a symbol that keeps getting reinvented by kids who’ve never heard of Willson, Naar, or any of the bands and brands wrongly credited with it. For a five-year investigation, the honest answer turned out to be that the mystery was the point all along — much like the internet’s other unsolvable little obsessions, from cursed images to the hunt for the world’s hardest tongue twister, that never really get “solved” so much as documented a little better each time someone bothers to look.