EDIT The smiley face was invented by Harvey Ball in 1963 for a Worcester, Massachusetts based insurance firm State Mutual Life Assurance. Though there was an attempt to trademark the image, it fell into the public domain before that could be accomplished.

The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by a pair of brothers, Murray and Bernard Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" (devised by Murray). By 1972 there were an estimated 50 million happy face buttons throughout the U.S., at which point the fad began to subside.

The smiley was one of the main icons adopted by the acid house dance music culture that emerged in the late 1980s. Especially in the UK, the logo was especially associated in the dance culture underground with the drug Ecstasy.

There have been variations such as reversing the mouth shape to get a sad face. The symbol has been satirized with a smile and three dots (a mutant), and has been reborn as the image of the Microsoft Bob software and Asda & Wal-Mart's "Rolling Back Prices" campaign.

The smiley has become a staple of Internet culture, with animated GIF and other image representations, as well as the ubiquitous text-based emoticon, " :) ". The smiley has been used for the printable version of characters 1 and 2 (one "black," the other "white") on the default font on the IBM PC and successor compatible machines, though modern fonts for graphical user interfaces often don't include those characters. The Unicode point U+263A ☺ WHITE SMILING FACE is a smiley, as is U+263B ☻ BLACK SMILING FACE. There is also U+2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE.

In May 2002, Luke Helder, a midwestern pipe-bomber, tried to replicate a smiley face in his pattern of pipe bombs. His first 16 bombs formed circles, the first in Nebraska and the second on the border between Illinois and Iowa. Those bombs completed the eyes. Two other bombs in Texas and Colorado were apparently the beginnings of the smile. However, he was captured before he completed it.

This text was copied from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, and is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Document License

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley

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