Hey, Melissa, did you see that sick dog at the park today?
Sick dog?
No, is it okay?
Is it okay?
No, it's not okay.
It's sick.
I had no idea dogs could skateboard.
What?
I don't understand.
What is a sick dog doing on a skateboard?
Huh?
The dog is sick because it's on a skateboard.
Duh.
Why is someone torturing this motion sickness prone dog for their own entertainment?
Whoa, sick kick flip!
Do your text message conversations leave something to be desired?
It's time for you to try emojis.
Feeling sarcastic?
Add a winky face.
Are you hungry?
Send a screen full of tacos.
Are you struggling to express the awesomeness of a skateboarding dog?
Send a dog, a skateboard, and a rock on emoji.
Feeling like a mermaid with pink and purple hair?
There's an emoji for that too.
Infuse texts with the whole range of human emotion with emojis.
Well, I am so happy that we don't have to live in a world without emojis.
Honestly, I can't even imagine it.
I'm Joy Dolo, and this is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning.
Today is all about emojis, and here to help me out is Melissa.
Hey, Melissa.
Hey.
Hey.
So do you have a favorite emoji?
I think the panda.
The panda?
Yeah.
What does the panda mean to you?
Adorableness.
So if you see something adorable, you would, like, send a panda?
Or a heart, if it's something adorable.
Pandas are adorable.
They are so cute.
I am totally with you on that one.
Why do you think emojis are useful?
Why do people like them so much?
For ease, so you don't have to type out full words.
You can just click a button and you get a face.
I think I've done that before.
Like, when I'm really happy, I'll send one of those really big smiley face ones, you know?
The ones that have a little bit of teeth in it.
Just to show that you're really happy.
Yeah.
I think a big question that I have is, like, where did that come from?
Have you thought about where they come from?
No.
They just, they're there.
Yeah.
They've just always been there.
They're there.
Well, we are not the only ones that love emojis.
More than six billion are sent every day.
But where did they come from?
Who created them?
Somewhere in history, there must have been a first emoji.
Every episode, we ask one of our reporter friends to take us on a deep dive into history.
And today, we're joined by Upside Down Smiley Face enthusiast, Elissa Dudley.
Hi.
Hey.
Hi.
If you're searching for the first emoji, all signs point to 1998 in Tokyo, Japan.
Back then, there were only two Harry Potter books.
YouTube didn't exist yet.
What?
And the kind of fancy smartphones we have today...
Those didn't exist either.
What?
I know.
In fact, most people didn't have cell phones at all.
The ones that did exist at the time were really basic.
Have you ever seen a super old cell phone, Melissa?
I mean, I don't think it's super old, but a flip phone?
That seems pretty old now, right?
Yeah, that's pretty old, yeah.
Those are pretty old.
Yeah, I remember the flip phones, and then I also had one that kind of looked like a remote.
These early cell phones had black and white screens that didn't do anything when you touched them.
And the screens were only about the size of a matchbook.
So the main use for a cell phone back then was just making phone calls.
But slowly, people were starting to use this brand new technology called texting.
Which was something that caught on way earlier in Japan than in the U.S., by the way.
At the time, text messages were limited to just a few sentences.
People were used to talking over the phone or writing long letters.
And when suddenly they were forced to communicate with fewer words, some things got lost.
For example, there's a word in Japanese that means understood or I understand.
And the way you say this word is important.
If you say it like this...
It's kind of like, got it, great.
But if you say it this way, it's more like, yeah, I get it.
Get to the point.
Yeah.
And the problem with text messages is you can't tell the difference.
And that can be confusing.
Have you ever had a miscommunication over text?
Sometimes my friends get mad at me because I spell things wrong.
Have you ever sent a text that's in like all caps where all the letters are capital?
I don't mean to yell, but I am.
Exactly.
Like it looks like you're yelling, but actually it's just.
Yeah.
Like, why are you yelling at me?
Exactly.
Communication is about way more than just stringing words together.
When you talk with someone in person, you're listening to the words they're saying sure, but your brain is processing so many other things at the same time.
You're paying attention to the tone of their voice and their facial expressions.
You notice the rhythm of their speech.
Are they talking really fast with urgency or at a slow, relaxed speed?
And you can also get information from their body language, like are they leaning in closer to hear you?
Or do they have their arms crossed?
Are they bored or keeping their distance?
Our brains take all of those cues and combine them along with words we're hearing, to understand language.
But all of that extremely important information disappears in a text message.
Wakadimashita.
But there was a guy who thought he could solve this problem.
He speaks Japanese, so we'll have someone translate, like this.
My name is Shigetaka Kurita.
In 1998, Shigetaka worked for a company that makes cell phones and he wanted a better way to express emotion through text.
He thought symbols could solve this problem.
For example, a little smiley face could let someone know when you're happy, not annoyed.
So Shigetaka's company decided to create a collection of something they called emojis, which is a Japanese word, by the way.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I never knew that.
Exactly.
It literally just means picture plus character in Japanese.
Anyways, creating emojis for these early cell phones was no easy task.
First of all, they had to be really small.
And also, there was no color, so it couldn't be a complicated drawing.
Shigetaka started with the simplest emojis he could think of.
The first ones I created were a heart and a smile.
Oh, hey, that's the one we were just talking about, Melissa, the heart.
Right?
Those are really useful ones.
I can see why he thought of them first.
And then he looked around for inspiration.
He studied the signs at train stations around Tokyo, the symbols on TV weather reports and also Japanese comics called manga.
Shigetaka created 200 emojis.
But his bosses didn't like all of them.
I had to get rid of the poop symbol.
Which I think is probably the most important.
Get rid of the poop.
We don't need that one.
In the end, Shigetaka's company released 176 emojis in 1999.
And people loved them.
For a while, these emojis were only popular in Japan.
But over the next 10 years, they slowly spread to other countries.
And now, emojis are everywhere.
In 2015, emojis were so popular that one of them was Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year the laughing-crying emoji.
Shigetaka is amazed at how far his emojis have spread.
The fact that people overseas wanted to use emojis in the same way is simply beyond my imagination, and it's such a surprise.
That's it.
Great.
So now we know.
We can all go home.
Answer found.
The first emoji was created by Shigetaka in Tokyo in 1999.
Good night, New York.
Thank you so much.
Melissa, you've been great.
It's actually a little more complicated than that.
We're going to have to travel back even farther.
Well, before we do that, let's take a break and play a game.
Melissa, are you ready to play a game of First Things First?
Sure.
All right, all right.
I have a list of three things and we have to decide which came first, which came second and then which came most recently in history.
Like, did hot dogs or hamburgers come first?
Absolutely.
Or did bicycles come before tricycles?
Or was it the other way around?
The answers are sealed in a top-secret envelope here in the studio.
Do you want to read today's three things, Melissa?
Yeah, here they are.
The peace sign, the yellow smiley face, the QWERTY keyboard.
That's the keyboard you find on computers.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen those before.
So what do you think?
I don't feel like the peace sign would be, I don't think that would be first.
You don't think that would be first?
No.
Nor the keyboard.
Oh, yeah.
So maybe the smiley face was first?
The smiley face was first, then the peace sign, and then keyboard.
That's a pretty good guess.
You know, I think that I say it would be the peace sign, QWERTY keyboard, yellow smiley face.
I think those are my guesses.
And we'll have the answer a little later in the show.
Forever Go will be right back.
Did you know that the first recorded omg came long before email, texting or snapchat?
It was 101 years ago, in 1917, a man named john fisher my friends call me jackie, all right, jackie was the first sea lord of the united kingdom, which means he was in charge of the navy.
In 1917.
He wrote a letter to the future British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Lord Fisher, to the Right Honourable Winston Churchill.
He complained about news of the day.
Some headlines in the newspapers have utterly upset me.
Terrible.
And he caught Winston up on his personal life.
Then, at the end of his letter, he typed the first documented use of O-M-G.
Open parentheses.
Oh my God.
Close parentheses.
So if anyone ever complains to you about newfangled text speak or internet slang, remind them.
OMG came before the invention of the microwave.
It's older than TV.
Heck, it's older than chocolate chip cookies.
And unless you've been around for 100 years, OMG is older than you.
This is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning.
And before we get back to the emojis of yesteryear, it's time for us to finish up our game that me and Melissa are playing.
First things first.
The three things today were the peace sign, the yellow smiley face, and the QWERTY keyboard.
Okay, Joy.
Here's the top secret envelope with the answers.
All right.
I'm going to open the envelope.
I'm going to do a drum roll.
And the first one is the QWERTY keyboard.
What?
The QWERTY keyboard.
I know.
The QWERTY keyboard.
It showed up in 1874.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah, it seems so long ago.
It was initially made for a typewriter.
Yeah, so the QWERTY keyboard was first.
And second, what do you think the second one was?
Smiley face.
Oh, you know, you were actually right the first time.
It was the peace sign.
So you got that one right, actually.
That was invented in 1958 by a British designer named Gerald Holtham.
And then last but not least is the smiley face, the yellow smiley face.
That was designed by American graphic artist Harvey Ross Ball in less than 10 minutes.
Wow.
Did you get the guesses right?
I did not.
You got the smiley face one right.
I got the smiley face one right, but the other two I was completely off.
So yeah, yeah, that's where the first things first.
QWERTY keyboard, the peace sign, and the smiley face.
Did that surprise you at all, that order?
Yes.
It was the complete opposite order than what I guessed.
All right.
Back to our search for the first emoji.
Reporter Alyssa Dudley is back in the studio.
Where did we leave off?
Hey.
Hey.
So I told you about Shigetaka Kurita and the emojis he designed specifically for cell phones in 1998.
Yep.
And a lot of people consider these emojis to be the first.
But before you crown him number one, there are a lot of other candidates.
You could call them pre-emojis or emoji ancestors.
See, when you try to find the first of something, it can get confusing fast.
I mean, what even counts as an emoji?
Like, what if you're writing a letter by hand and you draw a little thumbs up in it?
Is that an emoji?
I don't think so, just because he invented it to be on the phone.
So it has to be on a phone for it to even be an emoji.
If it's not on the emoji keyboard, it's not an emoji.
Well, not everyone agrees on what counts as an emoji.
And some people think, emojis got started in a computer lab in Pittsburgh 17 years before Shigetaka's.
We couldn't do any graphics.
We couldn't send pictures or video.
People on the same machine could send text messages to each other.
That's Scott Fallman.
He's been a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University since 1978, when most people didn't even have computers.
But Scott and his colleagues could use the local computer network on campus to talk.
It wasn't at all like the Internet we use today, where you can talk to anyone, anywhere.
This local network only allowed them to chat with people who were nearby on campus.
These message boards were mostly for university business, but there was one just for fun, too.
And that's where all this weird techie humor tended to appear.
For example, we were talking about what would happen if you were in the elevator and the cable broke and it went into free fall.
Would a bird flying inside the elevator get disoriented?
Would a candle burning in there get blown out?
What if there was a puddle of mercury on the elevator floor?
He thought it would grunge up into a sphere and start to rise.
And then someone chimed in to make a joke.
They said, Don't use the leftmost elevator in the science building.
Due to recent physics experiments, there's mercury contamination and some flame damage.
One of the university administrators was not amused.
What if someone thinks this is a serious safety warning?
This won't do at all.
And we said, oh boy, as long as this guy's around, we're going to have to mark everything that's meant as a joke.
Scott had run into the exact same problem as Shigetaka.
Human beings are master communicators in person.
But when we're forced to communicate with just words, no facial expressions, no body language, we're not so great at it.
So just like Shigetaka, he looked for a shortcut.
And I said gee, you can make a really nice smiley face if you could get people to turn their head sideways.
But would that ever catch on?
I don't know.
Scott made a smiley face out of three symbols you can find on most keyboards.
A colon, thus two little dots, one right above the other, a dash, and then a closed parenthesis.
And that's the line that curves off to the right, like a backwards letter C. Exactly.
Can you imagine what that looks like?
A colon, a dash, and a closed parenthesis.
Two dots, a little line in the middle, for the nose and the two dots for the eyes, and then the closed parentheses are the smiley face.
Just imagine, like, you're typing, you just flip the computer up, and you get a little face.
Yeah, it's sideways, right?
You have to turn your head to the left to see it.
And if you could flip your computer, you could do that.
Yes.
People call these kinds of smiley faces emoticons.
And they're not little pictures like emojis.
They're just combinations of the letters and symbols that are already on a regular keyboard, put together to look like faces or other things.
You could also do a cat by putting the colon and then a three.
So there's a colon and a three, and that makes a cat face.
A cat face.
Oh, because of the mouth.
I see where the whiskers would be.
Have you ever done the two dots with a zero?
So it's like an open face.
Shock face.
Wow.
Yeah.
Emoticons are often considered the ancestors of emojis.
Shigetaka Kurita says he was influenced by the Japanese version of emoticons, which are called cow emoji.
Anyways, Scott shared his sideways smiley face emoticon with his friends.
I figured it would amuse people and die out in a day or two.
Oh, yeah.
I don't think that happened.
Right?
It hasn't died out yet.
Not at all.
It made its way around to other universities in different cities.
And it was at this time that computers were getting way more popular, too.
When Scott first sent his smiley in 1982, less than 8% of Americans owned computers.
So that means, if you can imagine you get 100 people together in a room, only 8 of them would have computers.
By 1997, though, that number had more than quadrupled.
And something even bigger happened.
The Internet.
Oh, the Internet.
Yes.
Because suddenly you could send messages around the whole world.
So Scott's emoticons started spreading really fast.
You know people would send me mail from Russia and say hey, my mother just sent me this thing and it's got the smiley face in it.
From Moscow.
It was pretty amazing.
That's the first emoji.
Very cool.
That's what I thought, too.
But it turns out Scott Fallman doesn't even claim that his smiley was the first one.
He thinks the first emoji was earlier.
If people want to argue, I think the first emoticon is maybe the exclamation mark.
It's a piece of text that, without actually saying words, conveys some kind of emotion, in this case, surprise or excitement, or something like that.
So maybe the first emoticon is the exclamation point which came hundreds of years before Scott's smiley face.
Or maybe it's even farther back, with hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt.
Their writing system looked like little pictures, practically proto-emojis, and that was over 5000 years ago.
First a little bird, and then some water, and then a little guy...
But why stop there?
Maybe the first emoji was in a prehistoric cave painting over 40,000 years ago.
And now, for the finishing touches on this laughing, crying buffalo painting.
Perfect.
Well, that took some unexpected turns.
Sorry, I get a little carried away, you guys.
It's okay to have fun.
But it seems like we've been trying to solve this problem since the dawn of human history.
How do you express yourself with just pen and paper?
Or with a cave wall and some paint?
Or with your smartphone keyboard?
Or iPad?
There are so many possibilities for first emoji, and it's kind of overwhelming.
What do you think should count as the very first emoji?
I don't feel like the exclamation point is an emoji.
Why not?
You would put it at the end of a sentence to finish a sentence.
You wouldn't put an emoji to finish a sentence like, and that's what happened.
Smiley face.
That's a really good point.
You need those specific faces and characteristics to kind of describe a feeling, as opposed to a symbol.
Yeah.
Does it have to be on a phone or a computer?
Or could I draw one and call it an emoji?
That's a picture.
Do you think dinosaurs would use their really sharp claws to make smiley faces into the palm trees?
You know what?
I'm not going to rule it out.
I mean, I might have carved a smiley face into a palm tree.
You never know.
They were just trying to communicate.
Yeah.
They're trying to be happy.
Well, thanks for all that emoji history, Alyssa.
Yeah, thanks.
Thumbs up.
Waving hand.
Heart.
I guess that's just how Alyssa says goodbye now.
Makes perfect sense to me.
So, Melissa, there were 176 emojis back in the 90s when they were a brand new thing.
How many do you think there are today?
Roughly.
4,000?
Oh, yeah, that's really close.
And as of right now, there are 2,823.
Wow.
But our listeners think there's still room for innovation.
We asked them to dream up some futuristic emoji ideas, and here's what they had to say.
I think they could like move and talk and then maybe like bring you stuff.
I would send poop emojis so poop would show up.
I think that we won't have emojis in the future, because we're probably going to be able to contact our friends through our minds or something.
I don't know, it would just be like a little you.
You'll send it to somebody and then it'll pop up.
It'll just like come up like Star Wars when you get a message and it's like Luke Skywalker, like talking.
Then it could also speak like if they were alive.
Maybe they can move, that'd be cool.
If they can actually move, you know, wink or wave and stuff like that, that'd be dope.
It will not even like go with your word, it will be the word.
So, if you're thinking about future emojis like what we have right now, what do you think will be something that we see in the future?
Maybe a disco ball.
A disco ball.
Like you could have a party wherever you go.
It would be cool if it could like move, like physically spin.
Yeah, yeah.
Totally.
I wonder if that might be something we're leaning towards in the future, if we had text like emojis that can kind of pop up from your phone and dance around and then go back.
That'd be cool.
Well, let me tell you the story of one kid who had a great idea for a new emoji.
Her name is Rayouf Alhumedi.
She's 17, and she uses emojis all the time, especially in group texts with her friends.
They like to use emojis that look like them.
One of my friends has blonde hair and light skin, so she used that emoji.
And my other friend, she's darker and has black hair, so she used the other option of the emoji.
But Raif says there was no emoji for her because she's Muslim.
And as part of that, she wears a headscarf called a hijab.
I mean when you see me walking on the street or wherever, you automatically make the connection that oh, she's Muslim.
And I like that connection because Islam is a big part of my life.
So Rayouf decided she wanted an emoji that looked like her.
And she discovered that anyone can propose new emojis.
So that's what Rayouf did.
She sent a proposal for a hijab-wearing emoji to a group called the Unicode Consortium.
It's in charge of all things emoji.
She told them that there are over half a billion Muslim women in the world.
That's a lot of people.
You are absolutely right.
That is a lot of people.
And Ryu thought a lot of them would like to use an emoji that looks like them, too.
So she made her case.
She waited, and then it happened.
Unicode approved the hijab emoji.
Rayouf was so stoked, and now she uses it every chance she can get.
Even if it has nothing to do with the hijab emoji.
I just added it because you know it never hurts.
And my friends also just, it connotes Rayouf now.
Whenever they think of a hijab emoji, they think of Rayouf.
So a high school student made an emoji.
Right.
That's really cool.
I think so.
So if you had an emoji that you wanted to add, or an emoji that would describe you Melissa like, what would you do?
Hmm.
I mean, I don't know if it describes me, but I feel like you put an animal in a heart to say like I love this animal.
Yeah.
Like, I would put a panda in a heart.
Like a panda and then, like, a heart around it.
But like, if you see that animal, then you can like hold it down and then there'll be the heart around it and they can send that.
Yeah, yeah.
I think mine would have to be, like, a girl drinking coffee.
I think that pretty much describes my entire life for the last 10 years.
Just drinking coffee.
It's just throwing it back.
Well, we've been to a computer lab in the 80s, to Tokyo, to the Stone Age, and I think we'll just have to decide for ourselves what the origin of the emoji was.
Do you think Scott Fallon's smiley in 1982 was the beginning of it all?
Or are you going with Shigetaka Kurita's emojis in 1999?
Maybe you have a different idea entirely.
Listeners, we want to know what you think.
Head to foreverago.org to share your opinions, ideas, or just send us a high five.
River Go is brought to you by Brains On and American Public Media.
It's produced by Mark Sanchez, Sandon Totten, Molly Bloom, and Elissa Dudley.
We had engineering help from John Miller and Donald Patz.
Production help comes courtesy of Lauren Dee.
Our fact checker is Ryan Katz.
We'd also like to thank Eric Ringham Marley, Foyer Worker Otto James Kim, Sid Raskind, Tracy Mumford and Tsubasa Hamano.
And a special thanks to Brian Deer.
He's a tech entrepreneur and the author of The Friendly Orange Glow, which includes the story of another emoji ancestor that we didn't get to today.
What about you, Melissa?
Any special thanks you want to give today?
I'd like to give a shout out to my best friend, Summer.
And I'd also like to give a shout out to my two sisters, Tess and Julia.
All right.
I think it's time for us to say waving hand emoji.
Yep.
Thumbs up emoji.
Bye.
