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Founded in 1999, World Smile Day is a way to honor the memory of commercial artist Harvey Ross Ball, who created the smiley face that we all know and love.
Smiley Face was initially inspired by the need to calm down an office full of grumpy people. Let’s take a little trip back to Worcester, Massachusetts in 1963 and see what happened…
Smiley Face History
Harvey Ross Ball was asked to come up with an image that would cheer up the employees of a local insurance company. Why were they sad? Because a bunch of stressful business mergers had totally destroyed their morale. The company thought that a “friendship campaign” with some perky imagery would solve the problem.
So, Ball came up with the now infamous yellow grinning disk in less than ten minutes and was paid $240.
But wait – it didn’t look like today’s “Have a nice day” smiley face. The original smiley had no eyes and sported a mysterious Mona Lisa smile.
But Ball was worried that the cranky employees would invert the button and wear their smiles upside down, so he added eyes – deliberately making the right eye just a bit smaller than the left so the image wouldn’t look perfect.
History doesn’t tell us whether the friendship campaign was a success, but the business (now known as Worcester Insurance Company) still uses the smiley face on its marketing material.
Have a Happy Day
Let’s move forward to 1971, where brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, owners of a couple of Hallmark card shops in Philadelphia, added the slogan “Have a Happy Day” to Ball’s smiley face and copyrighted their revision (which soon morphed into “Have A Nice Day”). By year’s end, they’d sold more than 50 million grinning yellow buttons plus a multitude of other grinning products.
Following the tradition, in 1972 French journalist Franklin Loufrani began using the image in newspaper articles to indicate that the piece contained a rare bit of cheery news. He claimed commercial use rights for the smiley, which he successfully trademarked in over 100 countries. Shortly after, Loufrani launched the Smiley Company.
Strange Smiley Face Fact
Loufrani believes the Smiley image predates Ball and actually dates back thousands of years to prehistoric art. He references a stone-carved happy face dated to 2500 BC, which was found in a French cave.
But wait, there’s more! Here’s a smiley face dating back to 1741 in an old-school text message. And here’s another one, perhaps the world’s oldest smiley face, that dates back to 3,700 BC.
Emoticon Smiley
Today’s smiley is descended from the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes called an “emoticon”), created by Scott E. Fahlman. Back in the early 80s, Fahlman wanted to come up with a way to help computer programmers quickly and accurately identify sarcastic or humorous comments. It was a problem the Carnegie Mellon University community had been aware of for a while, but after “a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning” they decided to do something.
The happy face emoticon was born soon after, on September 19, 1982. Fahlman notes on his website that he wanted to use a frowny face to “indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.”
Celebrate World Smile Day
Head over to the World Smile Day website for everything you need to commemorate the day, online and off. There are stickers to print out, coloring pages, songs to sing, worldwide events to attend, and many other things.
Helping You Smile
The original smileys had one thing in common: no teeth. But we think a healthy, toothy grin is the best kind of smile. If you’re putting off dental care due to cost, a dental savings plan can help get your smile back into shape.
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