The factual origins of the Smiley are blurred, but it appears that the oldest known smiling-face artwork was found in Karkamis, Turkey, by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti. When piecing together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 B.C., they revealed the face adorned on the outside. One of the first commercial uses of a smiling face was in 1919, when the Buffalo-Springfield Roller Company applied stickers on receipts with the word "thanks" and a smiling face above it. However, it was quite detailed, similar to a "man in the moon" face. Many believe it wasn''t until 1963, when Harvey Ball was tasked with creating an image that would boost the morale of the employees of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company, that the simple black marks on a yellow background was rendered. There is some debate about whether his was the first simple version.

Some believe it began earlier, with the image used by New York''s radio station WMCA "Good Guys" in the early 1960s, and there was also a six-minute kids cartoon show called The Funny Company, which aired in 1963, and had a similar smiley in its credits. However, it was not on a yellow background, Harvey Balls'' smiley took him 10 minutes to create and he was paid $45. It looked a little unlike the one we''re used to today. Its eyes are narrow ovals, one larger than the other, and the mouth is not a perfect curve. The precise symmetry we''re now accustomed to arrived in 1970, when brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, who produced novelty items in Philadelphia, modified the smiley and put it onto buttons with the phrase "Have a nice day." This exploded across America, with the pin and other smiley products being exported and copied around the globe. Now, this is where the story gets confusing and litigious. In 1971, a clever journalist, Franklin Loufrani, working for French newspaper France-Soir, used the smiley as a way to let the readers know which of the paper''s stories held good news.

Before he started his campaign, Loufrani registered his own smiley face with the French trademark office, and by the 1990s, he and his son Nicolas held trademarks for the symbol in approximately 70 countries, but apparently not in the U.S. Regardless of who owns the trademark or copyright, the smiley has shown up in music, books and films that have been major cultural influencers. In 1971, underground comix genius R. Crumb heavily featured the smiley in issue #2 of his comic Mr. Natural. In 1977 the Talking Heads single "Psycho Killer" was issued as a 12" in Europe with a sleeve showing the torso of a man wearing an oversized and distorted smiley on his T-shirt. 1979 saw the Dead Kennedys release their debut single, "California Über Alles.

" The sleeve had a collage with California governor Jerry Brown in front of a Nazi rally. The swastikas on the banners were replaced by smileys. This smiley/swastika banner idea was used to great effect in 2003, when the controversial but brilliant British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman staged The Rape of Creativity, draping actual massive red, black and white banners emblazoned with the smiley down the front of the exhibition space. In their 2011 exhibition, Jake or Dinos Chapman, the brothers continued and developed the idea by giving their life-size Nazi SS sculptures smiley armbands. In their Come and See show in 2013, they created full-size Ku Klux Klan figures, with smiley patches on their white hooded gowns in place of the KKK insignia. The effect of this happy, innocent design being used by such evil characters is truly jarring. Since the late ''70s, Hollywood costume designers and prop departments have placed the smiley in movies as patches, stickers, pins, posters or painted on vehicles. The list is endless, but some notables are: Matt Dillon''s debut, Over the Edge (1979), Paris, Texas (1984), Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Empire Records (1995), Billy Madison (1995), The Prophecy (1995), Half Baked (1998) and The Virgin Suicides (1999).

In 1987 under a carpark in a fitness center in central London, a new club night called Shoom used a hand-drawn smiley on its flyer and later its membership card. DJ and promoter Danny Rampling wanted to convey "what this movement is all about--big smiles and positivity." From there the symbol went on to sweep the nation for the next few years as the face of the rave movement. By 1992 the rise of rave culture had spawned several musical subgenres and scenes. One that really took off in its own right was called hardcore, a music made up of hyper-frenetic breakbeats, with techno as its foundation. One of the biggest record labels of the hardcore scene, Suburban Base, had a resident visual artist, Dave Nodz. He created a superhero-comic-style character that had a smiley ball for a head, which was featured on several record covers. Back in the U.

S., issue #1 of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'' 1986 literary and graphic masterpiece Watchmen showed the Comedian''s blood-splattered smiley pin on the cover, and as an important visual signal within the story. Then, in 1991, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana gave the smile a new, darker twist, when a wonky hand-drawn version was used in the campaign for the band''s seminal, world-crushing Nevermind LP, and then became the iconic T-shirt. In 1993, to promote the ''70s period film Dazed and Confused, the studio simply used a smiley on the advance poster, with the words "Have A Nice Daze." In 1994, the feel-good Hollywood tearjerker Forrest Gump presented us with the fictitious idea that the smiley was created by Forrest''s sweat-and-mud-covered face being wiped on his T-shirt. The icon shows up in TV shows too. Matt Groening is a fan, including it in his early cartoons and many episodes of The Simpsons. The X-Files featured smileys in the ''80s and ''90s, and then David Duchovny carried on the tradition by wearing a big smiley shirt on his 2000s show Californication.

When the The X-Files relaunched, in a 2016 episode, the writers couldn''t resist turning the scary clay monster''s face into a smiley. Recent uses in music include in 2012, co-director Terence Neale''s clever use in Die Antwoord''s "Baby''s On Fire" video. In 2015, in the video for "Blackstar," David Bowie has a smiley patch on his spacesuit in his final, sad and epic gift to us. And in 2019, Mac DeMarco used nothing but a smiley button on the cover of his LP Here Comes the Cowboy. Recently the symbol has increasingly become a part of the hip, high and low-end fashion worlds, being utilized -- sometimes licensed, other times not -- and adorning all manner of clothing and objects, from hoodies to basketballs and lamps. Who knows what the future holds for smiley? With the world so upside down, we simply hope that artists and designers keep being creatively inspired to use it!.