The Daily Heller: Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick …
by Steven Heller, May 25, 2022

I’m not sure exactly how I came to be on its mailing list,
but for the past decade my inbox frequently pings with email
blasts from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In the right-
hand corner of each email is the emblem showing the top-left
quadrant of a clock face with the hour hand on 12 and the
minute hand between 11 & 12. An accompanying slogan ominously
reads: “It is 100 Seconds to Midnight.” This is the symbol for
what the editors branded the “Doomsday Clock.” Although its
simple graphic presence sends chills up my spine— and the
words “atomic” and “doomsday” trigger nightmarish imagery—
I’ve never unsubscribed. Nor have I ever had the urge to dig
deeper into the origin of this newsletter or its prophetic
Doomsday Clock. With the recent publication of The Doomsday
Clock at 75 by Robert K. Elder and J.C. Gabel (Hat and Beard
Press), at last I am formally introduced to a history of a
symbol that for some reason is arguably less well-known than
other popular cautionary signs.

“The Doomsday Clock is many things all at once: It’s a metaphor,
it’s a logo, it’s a brand, and it’s one of the most recognizable
symbols of the past 100 years,” write Elder and Gabel in the
introduction to their fascinating origin story. The ominous
clock was designed in June 1947 by Chicago landscape artist
Martyl Suzanne Schweig Langsdorf, who went by the mononym Martyl,
for the cover of the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
the same publication that I've been receiving in a digital format.
“The Clock sits at the crossroads of science and art,” they add,
“& therefore communicates an immediacy that few other forms can.
As designer Michael Bierut says, the Clock is ‘the most powerful
piece of information design of the 20th century.’ The Doomsday
Clock has permeated not only the media landscape, but also
culture itself.” The book documents iterations and the modern
manner in which the clock is used visually and linguistically.
The slogan “It is 100 seconds to midnight” has been adopted into
the global vernacular. “When it first appeared, Martyl’s Clock was
simply called ‘the Clock’ or the ‘Bulletin’s Clock,’” the authors write. “In 1917 American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote, ‘The fatal hour
is striking in all the doomsday clocks.” J. Robert Oppenheimer,
perhaps the most tormented of the scientist/inventors of the atom
bomb, wrote about a metaphorical “atomic clock” in the pages of the Bulletin in 1953. He’s quoted as saying, “conflict, tension and
armaments are to be with us. The trouble then is just this: During
this period the atomic clock ticks faster & faster. We may anticipate
a state of affairs in which two great powers will each be in a
position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other,
though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions
in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk
of his own life.”

The clock is a terrifying specter in the popular imagination, and
such a familiar shorthand for the end of days that in 2021 it was
added to the Oxford Dictionary. “One unobtrusive indicator of how
popular the Clock is in the imaginations of people is how many
people have tried to essentially steal it,” continue the authors,
who have done a thorough job of examining how the time on the Clock
has changed over the years, and how different designers (and artists
in general) have interpreted it as “a symbol of danger during an [ultra-dangerous] period of world history when the bomb alone is not
the only countdown symbolized by this image.”

https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick/

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