1. History of Emoji

2. 1648 - Robert Herrick - The first use of an emoticon in print?

3. 1862 - New York Times transcript of a speech by Abraham Lincoln
New York Times transcript of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. It contains a winky face?

4. 1881 - First instance of emoticons being use on purpose in print
First instance of emoticons being use on purpose in print. Issue of Puck Magazine showing how typographical art could be used to create characters with emotions

5. 1887 – Ambrose Bierce – Tongue in cheek essay on writing reform
1887 – Ambrose Bierce – Tongue in cheek essay on writing reform. He suggested new punctuation marks to represent humor or irony. Called it the “sniggerpoint”.

6. The first documented online use of the emoticon was by Scott Fahlman. He suggested using emoticon as a joke mark :-)

7. 1986 - Kaomoji first appeared on a Japanese forum
Kaomoji first appeared on a Japanese forum. ^_^ Kaomoji was heavily influenced by Manga and Anime.

8. The term emoticon appeared in print for the first time in a publication of the New York Times.

9. Emoji – means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji) A Japanese creation used for communication in the digital age. Especially important in Japanese where so much meaning is gleaned from context rather than exactly from what is being said.

10. Shigetaka Kurita is the designer of the first emoji for cellphones
Shigetaka Kurita is the designer of the first emoji for cellphones. Kurita first created emoji while he was a member of a team that, at the time, was preparing for the debut of NTT Docomo's i-mode, the world's first mobile Internet system. The debut was set for February 1999.

11. 2008 - Apple added emoji to its ios for Japanese users.

12. Emoji was added to the Unicode Consortium, an international coding standard for displaying characters on phones and computers. Once this happened, Apple introduced emoji as a standard international keyboard option.