---
title: Mona Lisa and emoticons
description: Who invented the icons and emoticons, prehistoric man, Egyptians or Americans? A short trip through the history of the emoticon.
image: https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/hubfs/Mona_Lisa_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci_from_C2RMF_Omslag-2.jpg
---
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# Mona Lisa and emoticons
07/ 04/2017 [Leoprinting](https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/author/leoprinting) [Leoprinting](https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/tag/leoprinting-en)
A question for you: Who invented the icons ....? I was thinking the Egyptians in their hieroglyphics .... After a little research I found out that these hieroglyphs for example, a falcon or a serpent letters and just when our alphabet to express sounds.
[](https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Lascaux-1.jpg) Petroglyph in Lascaux France
### Pictogram
The word Pictogram, let me explain: rock drawings of people from prehistoric times which can be found in many places on earth as the first icons. Picto originates from Latin 'pictus' or in English 'painted'. Gram comes from 'program' or 'letter'. One advantage is that this imagery is more universally understood by people with various languages. For example, pictograms are very useful in railway stations, airports, construction sites, factories, workshops, also on machines and lets not forget traffic icons. Another advantage may be a greater clarity. Pictogram (also called icons) are therefore widely used on computer screens.
[](https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Mona_Lisa_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci_from_C2RMF_smile-1.jpg) Mona Lisa smile
### Is Mona Lisa an emoticon?
Interestingly with the digital age we have a new kind of icons which express emotions withemoticons. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa's famous smile, the inventor of the first Emoticon?
### Smiley
In 1963 (the era of Love and Piece and the hippie culture) when computers still worked in shades of grey Richard Ball designed the first smiley for an advertising campaign. The smiley was supposed to be a kind of smiling sun.
[](https://blog.leoprinting.co.uk/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/emojis--1.png)
### **Colon dash bracket**
The computer smiley came much later. In 1982, Scott Fahlman a researcher at IBM typed the first colon dash hook on a bulletin board. (Bulletin Boards was the forerunners of websites.) It is said this was the birth of the first computer smiley. After researching old tapes from Scott Fahlman it became apparent that the first emoticon existed on 19 September 1982. [Here](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm) you see the original message. In the early 1980's it was difficult to see if someone posted a message on an online bulletin board placed if this was serious, funny or was sarcastic. The solution was to create characters here that the idea to create emoticons arose. Later, the computer was smiley colon dash bracket replaced with an image. Everyone uses them nowadays messenger, email, SMS and WhatsApp. Now everyday new ones are created making it difficult to keep everything up to date.
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