Famous badges

The origin of the smiley

In December 1963 the American insurance company State Mutual Assurance Company (Worcester, Massachusetts, USA) wanted to take action to raise the morale of its employees. The company just had a fusion and the enthusiasm of the personal was very poorly. This task was appointed to the one-man company Harvey Ball Advertising, also from Worcester.

Harvey Ball (1921 – 2001) immediately went to work with a black marker and a sheet of yellow paper. First he sketched only the circle and the smile, but he quickly added also the 2 eyes, to avoid that a few cynical employees would hang the design upside down. It was said that the job was done in less than 10 minutes: the smiley – or Happy Face as it was called then – was born!

The insurance company was enchanted and ordered 100 buttons. They literally flew out the door in a matter of time and the company immediately purchased another 10.000 pieces. Others took over the concept and hardly 8 years later – in 1971 – there were more than 50 million smileys sold. The insurance company then undertook an effort to claim the American copyright, but it was already too late. The drawing had become so popular that the Court considered it as part of the public domain and therefore freely accessible for all!

The original Smiley design by Harvey Ball

Loufrani took supermarket giant Wal-Mart to court

Meanwhile, the brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia had managed to acquire the American exploitation rights in 1970. They added the slogans “have a happy day” and “have a nice day” and brought in this way hundreds of different Smiley-products on the market: ties, dishes, mugs, shopping bags, ashtrays, t-shirts, stickers... you name it.

Another pirate on the coast was the French journalist Franklin Loufrani. He claimed that he had designed the Smiley in 1968 for the newspaper France Soir to indicate the articles that brought good news. On 1st October 1971 he recorded the symbol in France (depot nr. 1.695.775). Today, his London company Smileyworld Ltd. watches over the rights in more than 80 countries (not the USA). In June 2005 they won an important court case against the telecommunications company AOL France. In an attempt to claim his rights also on the American market, Franklin Loufrani took the supermarket giant Wal-Mart to court. Wal-Mart used the Smiley for years to mark its price discounts, and Loufrani challenged this.

Harvey Ball earned originally only $ 45,00 for his design

On the official website of Loufrani (www.smileyworld.com) you can check the so- called Smiley Dictionary. However, the name of Harvey Ball does not appear in it. Confronted with the work of Harvey Ball, Loufrani suggested that “one or other primitive person perhaps invented the Smiley sign in his basement, but that he was the first to register the image for commercial purposes”.

Harvey Ball has never claimed his copyrights. He thought it was only natural that a symbol that stood for happiness and optimism was freely accessible for everyone. Also the fact that he had earned only 45 USD for his design (the equivalent of the price for 100 buttons) did not bother him. But he made a point of his recognition as the spiritual father of the Smiley. He was outraged when, at the end of 1998, he heard of “a French guy” that sued several American companies for selling Smiley products outside the US.

To counter this he founded in 1999 the World Smile Foundation World Smile Foundation (www.worldsmile.org), a non profit organization that raises funds for children in need with the support of Smile ambassadors such as Brooke Shields, Phil Collins, and Yoko Ono. Since then, the Foundation organizes a World Smile Day every first Friday of the October (www.worldsmileday.com). Under the motto “Do an anct of kindness. Help one person smile” they seek to incite people worldwide to do a good deed. However, most of the activity is limited to his hometown of Worcester.

The poster fo World Smile Day 2006

Harvey Ball died on 4th april 2001. He was 79 years old.

:-)

The lateral Smileys or so-called emoticons that we use in our e-mails and chat sessions to express our emotions, were launched on September 19th 1982 by professor Scott E. Fahlman of the Carnegie University of Pittsburgh. For the how and why of these emoticons you can visit his homepage (www.cs.cmu.edu/ ~sef/sefSmiley.htm).

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