Page "Kilroy was here" Paragraph 18

A theory suggested by a spokesman for the Royal Air Force Museum London in 1977 was that Chad was probably an adaptation of the Greek letter Omega, used as the symbol for electrical resistance ; his creator was probably an electrician in a ground crew.

Life suggested that Chad originated with REME, and noted that a symbol for alternating current, a sine wave through a straight line, resembles Chad, that the plus and minus signs in his eyes represent polarity, and that his fingers are symbols of electrical resistors.

The character is usually drawn in Australia with pluses and minuses as eyes and the nose and eyes resemble a distorted sine wave.

Similarly, The Guardian noted in 2000 that several readers had told them that " Mr. Chad " was based on a diagram representing an electrical circuit.

One correspondent said that in 1941 at RAF Yatesbury a man named Dickie Lyle drew a version of the diagram as a face when the instructor had left the room, and wrote " Wot, no leave?

" beneath it.

This idea was repeated in a submission to the BBC in 2005 that included a story of a 1941 radar lecturer in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire drawing the circuit diagram, and the words " WOT!

No electrons?

" being added.

The RAF Cranwell Apprentices Association says that the image came from a diagram of how to approximate a square wave using sine waves, also at RAF Yatesbury and with an instructor named Chadwick, and was initially called Domie or Doomie, the latter name also being noted by Life as used by the RAF.

As alternatives to Chatterton or Mr Chadwick as the origin of the name Chad, REME claimed that the name came from their training school, nicknamed " Chad's Temple ", the RAF claimed it arose from Chadwick House at a Lancashire radio school, and the Desert Rats claimed it came from an officer in El Alamein.