Creating the first emoji

Witness History

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1999, Japanese software developer Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji.

The umbrella was one of 176 original images, featuring weather, transport signs, numbers and emotions.

He was inspired after noticing the popularity of a pager, aimed at teenagers, that used a heart symbol. The idea took off.

Now, more than 10 billion emoji are sent by people across the world every day, and World Emoji Day is celebrated each year on 17 July. It's the date marked on the emoji calendar.

Shigetaka told Jane Wilkinson of his pride in the creation.

(Photo: Umbrella emoji, 1999. Credit: Copyrighted by NTT DOCOMO)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Jane
0:09.1	Wilkinson. We're going back to 1999 to Japan for the invention of something that's used
0:18.0	billions of times every day across the world. I'm talking about the emoji. The pictures tagged
0:37.4	on to emails and texts to show how we feel without using words. And those noises are my best guess
0:44.8	at what the most popular emoji might sound like. Here's a joy. Do you think a party popper?
0:53.5	Capping hands, clinking glasses, angry face, shocked surprise, and a kiss.
1:02.8	And the man we have to thank for their worldwide popularity is Shigataka Karita. Back in 1999,
1:09.5	he was a software developer working on an internet project for the Japanese phone company
1:14.8	NTT Do Como. One day he noticed how much teenagers loved the pocket bell, a
1:20.4	pager that used a heart symbol. I was sending short messages and I realized I couldn't communicate
1:32.4	as well as I wanted. A simple question such as, what are you doing sounding the harsh? It was
1:39.2	difficult to show whether I was angry or not so I couldn't make my real feelings understood.
1:45.5	But I realized just by adding the heart symbol, a message would never sound negative than I
1:51.2	began to think that as well as letters using various emoji and a new service could make communication far
1:59.2	easier and smoother. His boss loved the idea. And he said yes go ahead but the only stuff who
2:09.2	actually walked on it was by self and one other person on the technical side and we had very
2:16.4	little time, about two months. It was like we were working on the side product in a little
2:23.8	corner. Compared to today's emoji, the first pictures were basic. That's because Shigataka had
2:30.4	to create them on a square grid of 12 by 12 pixels. That's a total of just 144 dots.
2:39.7	In the beginning, I was thinking about very simple emoji, not complicated ones. So the first ones
2:48.5	I walked on were to do with the weather. I started with the umbrella to test how we could do it.
2:56.3	Shigataka created 176 symbols covering weather, transport signs, numbers and emotions,
	...

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