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See "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir" by Norman Malcolm, pp 58-59: 
 
Norman Malcolm was a student of Wittgenstein's at Cambridge and  
they became lifelong friends.   
 
        "Wittgenstein related to me two anecdotes pertaining to the  
Tractatus, which perhaps I should record, although he also told them  
to several other persons. One has to do with the origination of the  
central idea of the Tractatus-that a proposition is a picture. This idea  
came to Wittgenstein when he was serving in the Austrian army in the  
First War. He saw a newspaper that described the occurrence and  
location of an automobile accident by means of a diagram or map. It  
occurred to Wittgenstein that this map was a proposition and that  
therein was revealed the essential nature of propositions-namely, to  
picture reality.   
 
        The other incident has to do with something that precipitated the  
destruction of this conception, Wittgenstein and P. Sraffa, a lecturer in  
economics at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas of  
the Tractatus. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when  
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes  
must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa  
made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like  
disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an  
outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is  
the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example produced in Wittgenstein the  
feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition  
and what it describes must have the same 'form'. This broke the hold  
on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a 'picture'  
of the reality it describes.'"   
 
And in a footnote on page 59: 
 
"Professor G. H. von Wright informs me that Wittgenstein related this  
incident to him somewhat differently: the question at issue, according  
to Wittgenstein, was whether every proposition must have a 'grammar',  
and Sraffa asked Wittgenstein what the 'grammar' of that gesture was.  
In describing the incident to von Wright, Wittgenstein did not mention  
the phrases 'logical form' or 'logical multiplicity'."   
 
Robert Brown 
 
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