Smiley is a word that comes from the English language, smiley means smiling. Initially, emoticons were called a stylized image of a smiling human face in the form of a yellow circle with two black dots and a black arc depicting a mouth. Now emoticons can not only smile, but also cry, get angry, sad and express many other emotions.
Graphic emoticon
It is believed that the author of the emoticon, which has become widespread and famous, is the American artist Harvey Bell. It was he who painted a yellow smiling face in December 1963.
Bell created the image that later became famous all over the world for the insurance company State Mutual Life Assurance Cos. of America. At that time, the United States was in the process of merging the largest insurance companies. The merger has instilled uncertainty in many employees about the future, making them confused, sad, and irritable. Therefore, the management of the companies in order to raise the corporate spirit decided to hold some kind of advertising campaign. To do this, they needed a bright, memorable symbol that could make the clerks smile, the development of which was entrusted to Harvey Bell.
According to Harvey himself, it took him no more than 10 minutes to create an emoticon. The artist received $ 45 for the painted image. Insurers made a pin badge out of Bell's emoticon and distributed it to all employees and customers. The promotion was a success, with the badges appealing to both insurance agents and customers, State Mutual Life Assurance Cos. of America ordered another 10,000 badges shortly after the start of the promotion. All the profit that Bell made from the original image he created was $ 45, he did not register it as a trademark and protect his copyrights.
In the early 1970s, the emoticon received its slogan "Have a Happy Day", coined by two Spanish brothers. From that moment on, the smiley became known all over the world, a simple drawing, equipped with an optimistic motto, became a hit. The smiley began to appear on clothes, postcards, emblems, etc. Again, no one bothered about copyright protection. The entrepreneurial French businessman Franklin Lowfrany, founder of Smiley Licensing, took advantage of this circumstance. He registered the smiley face as a trademark and made a lot of money from it.
Printable emoticon
The famous writer Vladimir Nabokov was the first to suggest using printed symbols to convey a smile and a positive. In one of his interviews, he suggested that it would be nice to come up with an official typographic sign for a smile. The writer proposed to make such a sign in the form of a lying parenthesis.
The official birthday of a printed emoticon is September 19, 1982. On this day, in one of the messages on the online bulletin board of Carnegie Melon University, the symbols ":-)" and ":-(" appeared, written by Professor Scott Eliot Fahlman. In the message, the professor explains that the smiling emoticon should be used for jokes messages, but sad for the serious. Scott Fahlman is still considered the official "father" of the print emoticon.
