A computer science professor invented the emoticon after a prank gone wrong

On September 19, In 1982, Carnegie Mellon University research assistant professor of computer science Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later shape the way people communicate online.

His suggestion: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish between jokes and serious comments.

While Fehlman describes himself as the “inventor… or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone moment of genius.

The whole episode began three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to his colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” an early online message board. The topic of discussion was investigating what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz came up with a specific scenario involving a lighted candle and a drop of mercury.

That night, computer scientist Howard Gale posted a message titled “Warning!” replied He claimed that an elevator was “contaminated with mercury” due to a physics experiment and suffered “a small amount of fire damage”. Despite posts clarifying that the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

The incident sparked an immediate debate about how to avoid such misunderstandings and “flame wars” (heated observations) that may arise from ill intent.

Fahlman later wrote in a retrospective post on his CMU website: “This problem led some of us (only half of them seriously) to suggest that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly flag posts that shouldn’t be taken seriously. However, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone of voice cues that convey this information when speaking in person or on the phone.

On September 17, 1982, the day after a misunderstanding on the CMU board, Swartz made the first concrete suggestion: “Maybe we should adopt a convention for putting a star.

In the subject line of any announcement that should be treated as a joke.

Within hours, several Carnegie Mellon computer scientists reviewed alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stantz suggested an elegant system: “How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?” Keith Wright defended the ampersand (&) symbol, arguing that it “looks funny” and “looks ridiculous”. Leonard Hammy suggested {#} because it “looks like two lips with teeth showing between them.”

Meanwhile, some Carnegie Mellon users were already using their solution. A group on the Gandalf VAX system later revealed that they used \__/ as “universally known as a smiley” to mark jokes. But apparently it did not go beyond that local system.

A winning formula

Two days after Swartz’s initial suggestion, Fehlman jumped into the fray with his famous post: “I suggest the following character sequence for joke markers: 🙂 Read it one way.” He added that serious messages could use 🙁 ), noting, “Maybe we should mark things that aren’t jokes given the current trends.”