Who invented the smiley face?
It’s likely one of the first images you ever attempted to draw as an artist.
With two pencil jabs, a flicked curvature, and a nice round circle, any child with a paper in front of them will have attempted the smiley face once their nursery artworks begin to resemble some faint coherence after the splodges and blobs of their initial creative offerings.
With such seeming instinctive simplicity, it’s assumed that the happy insignia has existed since time immemorial. Along with the peace sign and the heart, the smiley looks set to endure forever as a cheerful beacon of wellbeing, a universal flash of positivity that cuts across generations and cultures. It’s had a long run. Able to withstand social shifts with malleable ease, the smiley’s perma-grin has always managed to find a home in the latest tech innovations or artistic happenings, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Fahlman first figuring out the earliest “:-)” emoticon use in 1982, the virtual symbol of the acid house movement, and branching off into a whole cast of expressive yellow faces in the contemporary Emoji age.
Humankind has possibly been scribbling the smiley in some fashion for centuries before its popular explosion. To glean the earliest discernible smiley, we have to go back to 1700 BCE Turkey, when Nicolò Marchetti and his team of archaeologists were working in the Karkamış region. Uncovering a ceramic jug presumed to function as a pitcher for sweet drinks, the Hittite fragments revealed the unmistakable two dots and a curvature on its side once reassembled, now displayed in the Gaziantep Museum of Archaeology as the smiley’s oldest example.
Yet, such finds could be an erroneous read from the vantage point of the 2010s when the ancient jug was discovered, the smiley’s presence a sparse one for much of history since. For the next key addition to smiley evolution, we have to jump to the 17th century, when Trenčín town notary Ján Ladislaides in today’s Slovakia marked a satisfactory stamp on reviewing documents, positively assessing the municipality’s orderly finances with a gold smiley next to his signature.
It’s the 20th century which can confidently claim to have birthed the smiley to the world, however. After some hints and doodles captured by the Danish poet Johannes V Jensen’s correspondence to his publisher in 1900, and composer Erwin Schulhoff’s 1919 movement In Futurum’s score dotted with both proto-smilies and frownies, the smiling symbol began to take shape in earnest from the 1930s, the smiley began trickling into wider popular culture as minor logos or adorning posters for film and television.
While New York’s WCMA radio had inadvertently incorporated the colour yellow as part of its ‘Good Guys!’ promotional campaign, slapping a crude smiley on as many as 11,000 yellow jumpers, the official founding of the smiley as we understand it today came from the furiously fun world of insurance. Eager to raise staff morale after a corporate merger, Worcester, Massachusetts’ State Mutual Life Assurance Company hired graphic designer Harvey Ball in 1963 to create an image that would relieve employees from the anxiety of the top-down corporate upend. Initially drawing just a sunny circle with a smile, the realisation that such a symbol could just as easily sport a frown prompted two dots for eyes. The whole $45 commission took just ten minutes.
The 100 printed button pins intended for staff soon ballooned to 10,000, the smiley proving so popular that 50 million were demanded by 1971. There was some challenge to Ball’s smiley authorship. France Soir journalist Franklin Loufrani trademarked his own version of the happy face a year later, launching The Smiley Company after using the symbol to highlight sections of the newspaper. Later, his son and subsequent CEO, Nicolas, would cite history’s various examples as a clear counter to the official narrative of Ball’s smiley, but Ball was never truly driven by profit.
After the smiley had become a graphic icon of pop culture, a brief attempt to ascertain his patent position was met with attorneys telling him quite plainly that his sunny symbol was public domain. “It never bothered me,” he told the Hartford Courant in 1998. “I figured if I make the world a little happier, OK, fine”.
The smiley face has exploded across culture, finding new and inventive ways to beam its sunny grin to the world, no matter the era. If you want to draw your very own official Ball smiley, however, first, ensure narrow oval eyes, with the one on the right ever so slightly larger than the left. Paint a sunny yellow colour, and a less-than-perfect arc for a smile not too dissimilar to Mona Lisa’s wry smirk.
Lastly, the face must include creases at the side of the mouth and sit slightly off-centre, the right end higher than the left, with the left end just that bit thicker. With practice, you may also be able to master the world’s most recognisable symbol.
