How Our Digital Agency Got Its Name

Football can be an extraordinarily creative sport, but above all it brings people together across all walks of life and professions. Olaf Jeske, one of the later co-founders of digital agency 21TORR and at the time a graduate of the Lazi Academy in Stuttgart, loved playing football on Sunday mornings. One of his friends there bragged, in the local Swabian dialect: „Letscht Woch hab i 21 Torr gschosse!“ (“Last week I scored 21 goals!“)

The fact that this seemingly unremarkable sentence – whose truthfulness can hardly be verified anymore – ultimately gave 21TORR, or rather the 21TORR-Netzwerkklinik GbR back in 1994, its name, was certainly also due to the fact that there was a doctor among the amateur footballers.

He knew that “21TORR” was not just a random combination of letters and numbers, but that, in physically precise terms, it describes the ideal intraocular pressure for the human body. “Torr” is an old unit of measurement – equivalent to millimetres of mercury (mmHg), familiar from blood pressure readings.

The name goes back to Evangelista Torricelli, who in 1642 in Florence succeeded Galileo Galilei as court mathematician and developed the mercury barometer. (He later lent his name to the content management system Torricelli, which our digital agency developed between 2001 and 2004 and deployed in numerous website projects for our clients.)

In short: in the multimedia age of the time, with its strong focus on visuals, the name 21TORR was a perfect fit.

Our founders – former fellow students – are still on board today. They are now part of our holding company, Schöne Töchter GmbH. We are proud of that. And equally proud to still be owner-managed. Here’s to the next 30 years as a digital agency.

As a unit of pressure, the torr is now rarely used in Germany – except by eye doctors. The unit mmHg, however, continues to be used for the pressure of bodily fluids. The internationally recognised standard unit for pressure is the pascal – 21 torr equals exactly 2,799.76974 Pa.