Emoji TMs: an emotional journey
Emojis—those yellow smiley faces and pictographs for everything from apples to zebras—have quickly become an indispensable part of our modern communications. We take them for granted, but they actually have a long and complicated history, and IP plays a key role in their current form, and their future.
The history of what we now know as emojis starts hundreds of years before the telephone—let alone the smartphone—was invented.
The earliest use of a “smiley face” recorded to date was in 1635 (the year the Royal Mail introduced a public postal service in Britain).
Jan Ladislaides, a notary in the Slovak town of Trenčín (then in the Kingdom of Hungary), added a hand-drawn smiley face to his signature, presumably to indicate that he had reviewed and approved the Chamberlain of Trenčín’s financial accounts for that year (Figure 1).
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