The emoticon was invented, in its current form, as a means of moderating an intensely nerdy discussion. A nerdy discussion about—not to be redundant, but—physics. It was 1982. A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon were chatting on an online message board; they began discussing what might happen if the cable on their building's elevator were cut, sending the elevator into free fall. What if the falling elevator had a candle in it? Or a pigeon? Or a drop of mercury? And then their chat, as chats are wont to do, drove itself to an absurdly logical conclusion. "WARNING!" someone wrote. “Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury.”
This was, of course, a joke—if one of the heh rather than the haha variety. But the scientists realized that, out of context, someone might interpret all the hilarity as an actual emergency. They needed a symbol, they decided, to signal the fact that the only contamination taking place was of their minds, courtesy of all their hypothetical humor. Someone proposed an asterisk to do that work. Someone else suggested an ampersand (“&” resembling, the logic went, “a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter”). And then Scott Fahlman chimed in with the compound punctuation mark that would live on in chat windows and inboxes across the Internet:
