How a Physics Joke Inspired the First Emoticon

The humble smiley face emoticon, now a staple of online communication, owes its origin to a physics joke that didn't hit quite right at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982—and the three days of brainstorming that followed. It began when computer scientist Neil Swartz posted on a "bboard" discussion thread that was speculating about the fate of objects in a free-falling elevator; his hypothetical scenario involved a flaming candle and a mercury droplet. In a follow-up message, Howard Gayle passed along a warning to the group—a campus elevator had been "contaminated with mercury" and suffered minor fire damage. It was a joke, but it wasn't universally recognized as such. Thus began a discussion about how to signal jokes in text-based online conversations.

"Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke," Swartz suggested in a post on Sept. 17. Others suggested their own options, such as % or & or {#} (the last being described as a stand-in for lips and teeth), before Scott Fahlman proposed the now-familiar :-) mark two days later. "Read it sideways," he wrote, then added, "Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(."

The emoticons quickly spread beyond Carnegie Mellon, appearing across ARPAnet (the precursor to the internet) and eventually becoming a standard feature of online communication. As Benj Edwards writes for Ars Technica, the full thread, which you can read here, shows "how collaboratively the emoticon was developed—not a lone genius moment."

"Rather, Fahlman synthesized the best elements from the ongoing discussion," Edwards continues, "the simplicity of single-character proposals, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the sideways-reading principle hinted at by ... {#}, and a complete binary system that covered both humor :-) and seriousness :-(." His full piece, which also looks at the emergence of the emoji, is worth a read. As for what Fahlman thinks about his idea, he had this to say to the university on the emoticon's 25th birthday: "It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in ten minutes to something that has spread all around the world."