Special Guest Blogger: Harvey Ball

After serving 27 years in the military, and then another six in the Army Reserves, i was pretty fed up with war so i retired from the service to become an advertising artist and started up my own business and i was pretty good at it, so good in fact that i was approached by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company who asked me to come up with a design to make into a badge to cheer their miserable people up.
Within ten minutes i had designed a simple bright sunny yellow smiley face with narrow oval eyes with the one on the right slightly larger than the other and a slightly off center mouth.
The executives loved it and paid me $45 for my creation which they turned into 100 badges and handed out to their staff and soon other people wanted the smiley badges too after a New York City radio station WMCA began giving away t-shirts with my cheerful design on it and in 8 years 50-million of the things had been sold and it had become an international icon after the French adopted it and started to use it and it appeared on t-shirts, hats and mugs and became known as a 'smilie'.
So you would probably assume i made a fortune and lived out the rest of my life driving speed boats and living in a mansion? You would assume wrong because of the tens of millions it generated, i only saw that original $45 as i never trademarked or copyrighted it but as the inventor of the original smiley face i couldn't be to upset about it.
A British company called The Smiley Company now holds the rights and has an annual turnover of $167 million but i died of liver failure in 2001 so i saw my icon become the basis for every emoticon on the Internet but that poo one had nothing to do with me.