The Westinghouse Sign was a large, animated, electric sign advertising the Westinghouse Electric company and located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The sign was best known for the huge number of combinations in which it was commonly believed its individual elements could be illuminated. The sign was removed in 1998 when the building on which it was mounted was demolished to make way for the construction of PNC Park.
The various corporations which have carried the Westinghouse name have erected countless signs and other promotional devices during the past 140 years, including many in the corporate hometown of Pittsburgh. A cubic Westinghouse sign stood in downtown Pittsburgh for approximately thirty five years and was so familiar that it was allowed to remain in place until 2002, even after the building it marked (the Westinghouse Tower) was no longer owned or occupied by Westinghouse.
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The Westinghouse Sign was mounted atop the WESCO building in Pittsburgh's North Shore neighborhood. WESCO began as the Westinghouse Electrical Supply Company, an offshoot of the original Westinghouse Electric founded by George Westinghouse in 1886. The sign consisted of nine repetitions of the familiar "Circle-W" logo created by graphic designer Paul Rand, each one eighteen feet in diameter. Each Circle-W was divided into ten sections—the top and bottom of the enclosing circle, the four diagonal strokes of the W, the three dots above the W, and the bar below—meaning that the entire sign comprised ninety individual elements. It is described as having been lit by neon tubes, but as the sign was blue it is likely that argon tubes were actually used.
The WESCO building stood near Three Rivers Stadium on the banks of the Allegheny River just opposite Downtown Pittsburgh, and the sign was one of several large illuminated corporate billboards that became a fixture of Pittsburgh's evening skyline. (The Alcoa sign atop Mount Washington was another.)
What distinguished the Westinghouse sign was the common perception that there was a practically infinite number of sequences in which the sign's elements could be lit, and that no sequence was ever repeated. The Westinghouse corporation encouraged this perception. In reality, only a very small number of lighting combinations—perhaps fewer than thirty—were actually displayed. This was because the sign was controlled by Westinghouse's own Numalogic Programmable Logic Controllers, which were well-suited to controlling repetitive tasks but were not designed to generate an ever-changing sequence of new instructions.
The sign was demolished when the WESCO building was razed in the autumn of 1998 to make way for PNC Park, which succeeded Three Rivers as the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Preservationists intended to save at least one of the Circle-W units for eventual display at the Senator John Heinz History Center. However, both the physical structure and electrical components were in such a state of decay that this was not possible, and the sign literally fell apart as it was dismantled. While newspaper accounts of the time report that at least one Circle-W was saved, individuals involved in the project report that nothing was salvagable.
Smaller versions of the sign were erected in Atlanta, Georgia; Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City. The latter was located along Queens Boulevard on the approach to LaGuardia Airport. These each included three repetitions of the Circle-W insignia.
Only a few dozen lighting sequences were actually programmed into the sign's controller. Some online discussions of the sign reveal comments from individuals observant enough to have noted the repetition.[1] Nonetheless, most of those familiar with the sign believed that it was slowly cycling through an essentially infinite number of possible lighting combinations.
If the only stipulation were that one element at a time would be lit the number of possible sequences is simply:
90! = (90•89•88•87...3•2•1) ≈ 1.486 x 10138, or 1.486 quintoquadrogintillion. (The exact value is 1 485 715 964 481 761 497 309 522 733 620 825 737 885 569 961 284 688 766 942 216 863 704 985 393 094 065 876 545 992 131 370 884 059 645 617 234 469 978 112 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.)
Such a number may be incomprehensibly huge. If the Big Bang is reckoned to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago there have been "only" about 4.5 x 1017 seconds since the birth of the universe. It is estimated that the Earth is made up of roughly 5.5 x 1050 atoms; the number of atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 5 x 1068, and the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 3.5 x 1079.[2][3][4]
However, the sequences programmed into the sign's controller suggested to some that the possible total was guided by one or more patterns (e.g., the same element--perhaps the bar below the W--would be lit in each of the nine units, working either left to right or right to left, followed by all nine instances of a second element, and so on, until all ten elements in all nine units were lit). It became a sort of mathematical puzzle to determine what the total number of sequences would be, given these (imagined) patterns.
For the smaller three-unit signs, the number of possible combinations under the "one at a time" scenario would have been:
30! ≈ 2.653 x 1032, or 265.3 nonillion. (The exact number is 265 252 859 812 191 058 636 308 480 000 000.)
This number may be quite small when compared to the figure for the nine-unit sign (it is 1.785 x 10-106 the size of the larger number—or 178 quintrigintillionths) but it nonetheless represents a number that may be well beyond a familiar human scale. One nonillion is approximately the number of bacteria living on Earth.