Who Invented the Smiley Face

Most inventions have one author and one date. The smiley face has at least four contenders — and more than a century between the earliest and the latest claim. That alone is strange. But here's what's stranger: each of these people has a real claim to it. And the argument between them hasn't been settled — not because historians didn't look hard enough, but because they're all describing different things and calling them by the same name.

Start with the most precise one. September nineteenth, nineteen eighty-two. Eleven forty-four in the morning. Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, posts a message on an electronic bulletin board. He suggests marking jokes with a colon, a dash, and a closing parenthesis, and marking serious posts with a colon, a dash, and a closing bracket. He adds: read it sideways. Not an artistic flourish — a practical fix. On the university's local network, people kept getting into fights over jokes that fell flat, and there needed to be a signal: this isn't serious, don't take offense. That original post was considered lost for years. In the early two-thousands, people had to go digging through old backup tapes just to find it — the smiley's "birth certificate" had to be excavated from digital rubble.

But nineteen years before Fahlman — in December nineteen sixty-three — an artist named Harvey Ross Ball, in Worcester, Massachusetts, was drawing something entirely different. An insurance company was going through a rough reorganization: layoffs, low morale, complaints piling up. Management hired Ball to design a symbol for buttons, something to lift spirits. A yellow circle, two oval eyes, a curved smile. It took him about ten minutes. His fee was forty-five dollars. He never filed for any rights to it. The buttons sold in the millions — and the man who drew it never earned much of anything from the image for the rest of his life.

The yellow face got its commercial life from someone else — a French editor named Franklin Loufrani. In the early nineteen-seventies, he started using the symbol to flag good news stories in a newspaper, and he officially registered it as the trademark Smiley. From there came licensing deals, merchandise, lawsuits. Legally speaking, the author of the commercial smiley wasn't Ball — it was Loufrani. That split, between who drew it and who owns it, still fuels the whole dispute today.

Now go back further still. Eighteen eighty-one. An American humor magazine called Puck prints four combinations of punctuation marks: a happy face, a sad one, a surprised one, an indifferent one. Pure typesetting — no internet, no character set, just an experiment with punctuation. Researchers point to this issue as the "earliest" smiley on record. But — and this matters — that experiment stayed a one-off. It didn't catch on, didn't spread, didn't change how anyone wrote to each other. Unlike Fahlman's proposal, which the network picked up almost instantly.

And then there's Nabokov. In nineteen sixty-nine, in an interview with The New York Times, he's asked what typographical mark he wishes existed. He answers: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — a supine round bracket, with two dots for the eyes. That quote has circulated online for years as proof that Nabokov "predicted the smiley." But listen to the tone — he's talking about a new letter for the alphabet, a punctuation mark for the future, not a sequence of keystrokes. It's an aesthetic wish, an editor's daydream. Not a protocol.

And here's the real point. One word — "smiley" — is doing the work of three different things. The graphic yellow circle: that's Ball. The text emoticon built from punctuation marks: that's Fahlman. And the underlying idea — marking an emotion with a simple symbol — that runs from Puck through Nabokov and further back still, all the way to pottery shards with scratched-in faces that archaeologists keep finding across wildly different cultures. A media historian and a programmer are using the same word for two different things. So there's no single right answer — there can't be.

Fahlman himself, by the way, always talked about this without any fuss. What mattered, he said, wasn't the colon next to the parenthesis — it was proposing it as a shared agreement: let's use this to flag a joke. Not an image — a social protocol. And it's that protocol that every emoticon and emoji since has grown out of — the entire language of emotion in digital messaging.

Ask me about Harvey Ball and his forty-five dollars sometime — I know exactly how that story ends, with licensing deals worth millions that he never saw a cent of.

The world is enormous and one question is enough to start. moygid dot online.