The First Emoji
The very first winky face emoticon may have appeared in an 1862 New York Times transcript of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. Though, some argue that it may have just been a typo. But it’s clearer that the first time an emoticon was actually used on the web was on Sept. 19, 1982.
It was on that fateful day that a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman made what was likely the first documented use of typed characters to express emotion on the internet. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” Fahlman wrote.