the road sign depicts a sideways view of an old bellows camera
One of the mysterious speed camera road signs that are ubiquitous in the U.K. Photo: National Motor Museum/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

Last April, Twitter erupted into a heated debate: what is the U.K.’s ‘Speed Camera’ sign, meant to be?

Like the Rorschach test, where one person might see a jumping bunny and another might see a pair of bloody knives (and might need to look into some therapy), or 2015’s internet-breaking blue or gold dress (it’s blue, by the way), people were split into two camps when it came to the Speed Camera design: those who thought it showed a Victorian bellows camera in profile, and those who thought it was a modern CCTV system facing forwards. Despite the online debate, the speed sign first produced in 1990s does actually show a Victorian bellows camera.

The online debate was sparked by a tweet on April 4 2023 by user @FeyeraBender who wrote “for years i thought the UK speed camera sign depicted a Victorian bellows camera pointing to the right, but it’s just a boring CCTV camera pointing towards the viewer :/”. The next day—after replies flooded in that the user had “ruined” the sign for people, with one user calling it “one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard”—@FeyeraBender tweeted “wow i’m so sorry to have caused so much distress and discomfort” followed by fingers in a peace symbol and a sad face emoji.

But the user was mistaken. In fact, in 2008 the BBC posted an article ‘What makes a good road sign?’ and used the speed camera icon as a key example. They wrote: “A 19th Century-style bellows camera is used, with great success, to warn of the imminent danger of racking up a speeding fine.” The speed camera sign isn’t the only symbol throwing back to the Victorian times, either, with the BBC adding that “rail enthusiasts’ hearts must race at the symbol of a steam train before level crossings”, still used today despite the fact that the last steam locomotive used for British Railways was created in 1960.

Advert for the Goerz Pocket Tenax camera, 1909. Photo: The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images.

Despite the false missive, multiple press outlets believed the user’s claim, including DerbyshireLive and CornwallLive who both ran coverage on the this new revelation. CornwallLive wrote just days after the original tweet: “Have you ever assumed the picture is that of a side-profile camera? Well, it turns out it shows something completely different.” Always do your research, kids. And no, reading a tweet doesn’t count as research.

The U.K. is home to more than 7,000 speed cameras, and the bellows symbol was created by the Department for Transport sometime in the 1990s, after the first speed camera was installed in the UK on the M40 motorway in 1991. The first British bellows camera was invented some 130 years earlier, in May 1856. Bellows allowed photographers to move their lenses, altering the focus of their shot.