Big yellow smilling face !!!!!

Some consider it as iconic to expressing your feeling while chatting while the rest consider it as a image synonomus to stress buster. but for me it is the one of the bigggest examples of creativity in the past 50 years. Well, i was talking about what we all know it as smiley the big yellow face which we see it on net, posters, balls, cards , toys and where not.

Just a couple of days back while chatting to a friend i was just wondering who created this Smiley. The first thought was Yahoo, because i first saw it on Y Messenger. while looging we can always see the improvised version of original smilie. i was just trying to join bits and pieces to find answer but then google was there for my rescue. Intrestigly what i found on google was much more baffling. Many people have claimed it their creation and earned huge huge amt of money. But in many web pages i found that they concluded the original inventor was Harvey R. Ball of Worcester, Massachusetts, who drew the smiley in 1963.

The whole story goes like this (picked from a web page)

Harvey got the assignment from the company's promotions director, Joy Young, who wanted a smile button for a morale boosting campaign ordered up by her boss. Harvey, not a man to waste ink, initially drew just the smile. Pondering the result, he realized that if you turned the button upside down, it became ... a frown! To head incipient wise-arsedness off at the pass, he added two eyes, which of course you could also turn upside down, but then it meant ... I'm standing on my head!--a more ambiguous sociopolitical message. He made the thing yellow to give it a sunshiny look, and State Mutual, whom nobody would accuse of rashness, printed up 100. The buttons were a big hit, the company began handing them out by the thousands, and the rest you know. Mr. Ball's total take: his $45 art fee. State Mutual, not very quick on the uptake, didn't make any money

either.

But the first people to have saw the commercial appeal in this smilie were two brothers in Philadelphia, Bernard and Murray Spain. They made different products, posters, shirts, greeting cards, mugs and dozens of other items and made millions of $ then. There are many other who still falcly clam it to be their creation.

Harvey never got his due credit for his creativity, neither in turns of money nor recognition. I just imagine if Patenet laws were present then and Harvey had its creativity patented, his name would have been still alive. not hoping against the hope, Mr. Bill gates might have offered him few million dollars to get those right to use it.

Phew it would have been a different story all together.