The Emoticon Was Born From a Physics Joke in 1982
▼ Summary
– Scott Fahlman proposed using 🙂 and 🙁 on September 19, 1982 to distinguish jokes from serious comments on Carnegie Mellon’s online bulletin board.
– The discussion began after a facetious warning about a mercury-contaminated elevator by Howard Gayle was mistaken as serious, despite clarifying posts.
– This incident highlighted the need to prevent misunderstandings and “flame wars” in text-based online communication lacking tone or body language cues.
– Fahlman suggested marking posts not to be taken seriously to address the absence of non-verbal cues in digital conversations.
– While Fahlman is credited as an inventor of the emoticon, he acknowledges the story involves broader collaborative input rather than a lone genius moment.
The digital smiley face, now a cornerstone of online communication, owes its existence to a physics joke that spiraled out of control on a university message board in 1982. This simple punctuation combination was proposed as a solution to the growing problem of misinterpreted humor in text-based discussions, offering a clear signal for lighthearted intent. What began as an academic necessity quickly evolved into a global shorthand for emotion.
Three days before the historic post, a thread on Carnegie Mellon University’s early online bulletin board, known as the “bboard,” was exploring a physics thought experiment. Computer scientist Neil Swartz had posed a question about the behavior of objects, specifically a lit candle and a drop of mercury, inside a free-falling elevator. The conversation took an unexpected turn when Howard Gayle, another researcher, posted a mock warning later that evening. His message, titled “WARNING!”, claimed a campus elevator had been contaminated with mercury and had sustained fire damage from a physics experiment. Despite subsequent clarifications that the alert was entirely facetious, a number of individuals interpreted it as a genuine safety hazard.
This misunderstanding ignited immediate concern among the computer science community about how to prevent such confusions in the future. They recognized that without the vocal inflections and physical gestures present in face-to-face conversation, it was remarkably easy for sarcasm or jest to be misread, potentially sparking intense and unnecessary arguments known as “flame wars.”
Reflecting on the event, Scott Fahlman, a research assistant professor at the time, noted that the incident led several people to half-seriously suggest a need for a marker to flag non-serious posts. He observed that text-based communication strips away the critical contextual cues of body language and tone of voice. On September 19, 1982, Fahlman acted on this idea by posting his now-famous suggestion to the bulletin board: use the character sequences 🙂 and 🙁 to distinguish jokes from serious content. While he humbly refers to himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors,” the creation was a direct and practical response to a communal need for clarity.
(Source: Ars Technica)
