Today, emojis are used by absolutely everyone. However, there is a lot of debate about when and who exactly first started using smiley faces. Opinions differ: many believe that emojis appeared in the late 20th century alongside the invention of gadgets for quick message exchange.
But there are also those who believe that smileys existed as far back as the 19th century. For instance, in Abraham Lincoln’s speech, a 😉 smiley face was discovered after the phrase “Applause and laughter.” It could have been a simple typo. AdmiGram.com decided to delve into this question and definitively find out where the very first smiley originated.
Origin of the “smiley”: History of the Internet
As of today, the most reliably known facts about the smiley are as follows:
The first stylized image of a human face to express emotions in art was used by director Ingmar Bergman in the film “Port of Call,” but this image conveyed suffering. Later, a happy face was used in the advertising campaigns of the movies “Lili” in 1953 and “Gigi” in 1958.
The happy face was first introduced into popular culture in 1958 when radio station WMCA in New York held a contest for the most popular radio show of the time, “Cousin Brucie.” Listeners who answered questions on the phone were awarded a sweatshirt that featured a drawing of a happy face. Thousands of these sweatshirts were given out in the late 1950s.
In 1963, Harvey Ball, an American commercial artist, was commissioned by an advertising company to create an image of a happy face to be used on buttons. His design, consisting of dark oval eyes and folds at the sides of the mouth on a bright yellow background, became the most iconic version.
In a historic first, writer Vladimir Nabokov came up with the idea of using a bracket as a smile in 1969, stating in an interview with The New York Times: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
