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We headed to Yahoo! and typed "happy face inventor" into the search bar. Although we didn't find any matching Yahoo! categories, we did receive a list of Google search results that made us very, very happy. The inventor of the ubiquitous yellow smiley face was Harvey Ball, a World War II veteran and graphic designer from Worcester, Massachusetts. He died last April at 79, having earned 45 dollars from his masterpiece. The smiley face rose from the ashes of a particularly nasty corporate merger. During the early '60s, employee morale at the State Mutual Life Insurance was suffering. To perk
up the workers, management decided to implement a "friendship campaign," which mandated smiling during office hours. Ball spent 10 minutes designing the smiley face on a freelance assignment and was paid his standard rate. The smiley face stickers became a local hit, but it wasn't until almost 10 years later that the face would become a cultural phenomenon. Two Philadelphia brothers, Bernard and Murray Spain, cranked out thousands of shirts, buttons, and stickers, making a pile of money in the process. The fad lasted about a year and half, more than enough time to stamp the smiley face into the hearts and
minds of a generation. By 1972 the number of smiley face buttons was estimated at 50 million. With the growing dependence on email and instant messaging, the smiley face has seen a resurgence in popularity. However, in the buzzword-loving '90s and '00s, the smiley face  is referred to as an emoticon and has gained several friends. 
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