Bahamas Philately: 1965 Centenary of the International Telecommunication Union (1865-1965) – 1d I.T.U. Emblem

The International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) logo first appeared in 1947. Mr. Gerry Gross, the then Deputy Secretary-General of ITU, commissioned an emblem for the important International Telecommunication Conference (ITC) that was to take place in Atlantic City that year. The emblem – a globe with lightning flash – appeared on many documents during the conference.

After the 1947 conference, the emblem was gradually adopted by ITU as the official logo for the Union. By 1950, the globe and lightning flash – now with the ITU acronym – began to appear on a variety of ITU publications as well as on the letterhead of official correspondence.

The logo was intended to symbolize the speed of communications, equal to that of lightening, and to illustrate the fact that ITU promotes the development of the world-wide network through its regulation, coordination, planning and standardization activities.

During ITU’s Centenary celebrations in 1965, the logo was formally recognized when the ITU Administrative Council approved a recommendation to “[retain] the emblem that has been very widely used since 1947 and which enabled all Union documents to be identified very rapidly.”