“Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates”: 76 Scary Signs That Are Very Good At Doing Their Job (New Pics)

Since the dawn of time, humanity has harbored a peculiar, almost magnetic attraction to things that can poke, burn, or dissolve us. If you tell a toddler not to touch a hot stove, they will treat that instruction as a personal challenge. This innate human desire to poke the metaphorical bear is exactly why we spent the last few thousand years perfecting the art of the scary warning sign.

Long before we had neon yellow stickers, our ancestors relied on more "creative" methods to keep people away from trouble. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, didn't have high-voltage stickers for their tombs, so they opted for elaborate curses that promised to have a giant snake eat anyone who disturbed the Pharaoh’s nap. It was the original "No Trespassing" sign.

As civilization progressed and we started inventing more ways to accidentally injure ourselves through chemistry and industry, the need for a universal visual language became dire. Enter the skull and crossbones, the undisputed heavyweight champion of scary symbols. While we mostly associate it with pirates and "Arrr-rated" movies today, it was actually used as a memento mori on gravestones long before it was slapped on a bottle of bleach.

In the 1800s, various pharmaceutical associations realized that people were accidentally drinking things they shouldn't, so they adopted the skull to signify "this will end your journey early." The problem was that the skull and crossbones looked a bit too much like a cool pirate flag to children, who saw it and thought they were about to embark on a swashbuckling adventure rather than a trip to the emergency room.

By the mid-20th century, humanity began playing with things that were invisible but extremely grumpy, like radiation. In 1946, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, realized they needed a way to label the spicy atoms they were working with. They came up with the radiation trefoil, which originally featured a magenta symbol on a blue background.

The blue was eventually ditched because it looked too much like a standard "information" sign, and let’s be honest, you don't want to mistake a vat of uranium for a water fountain. The yellow and black color scheme we know today was chosen because it screams "danger" louder than a heavy metal concert, mimicking the warning colors of wasps and snakes.

The 1960s gave us the biohazard symbol, which is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing way to tell someone they are entering a zone of infectious doom. It was designed by Dow Chemical specifically to be "uniquely memorable but meaningless."

They tested a bunch of shapes and picked the one that people remembered the best but couldn't associate with anything else, like a logo for a local bakery or a car brand. It looks like a futuristic shuriken, but its sole job is to tell you that the air in the room might be full of things that want to take up permanent residence in your lungs. It is a masterpiece of psychological design: it doesn't look like anything in nature, which makes it feel eerie and artificial.

As the 1970s rolled around, safety experts realized that the "cool pirate" problem with the skull and crossbones was still an issue for kids. This led to the creation of Mr. Yuk, a bright green, frowning face that looks like he just smelled a gym bag from 1985. The idea was that green is "yucky" and a frowny face is a universal sign for "don't put this in your mouth." It worked brilliantly, mostly because kids are surprisingly judgmental about facial expressions. If a sticker looks disgusted with the contents of a bottle, children are much less likely to treat it like a juice box.

The most fascinating, and slightly terrifying, chapter in the history of warning signs is the one we haven't finished writing yet. We are currently trying to figure out how to warn people 10,000 years from now about buried nuclear waste. Language evolves so fast that "Stay Away" might mean "Free Tacos" in ten millennia. This field of study, known as nuclear semiotics, has produced some truly wild ideas.

Scientists have proposed building "landscapes of thorns" made of massive concrete spikes, or even genetically engineering "ray cats" that change color when they get near radiation. The idea is that we would create legends and folk songs about the color-changing cats so future civilizations would know to run when the kitty turns neon. It is a long way from the Pharaoh’s curse, but the message remains the same: please, for the love of everything, don't touch that. Whether it is a frowny green face or a field of concrete spikes, the history of warning signs is really just the history of humans trying to save ourselves from our own insatiable curiosity.