Though emoticons have become widely popular in the Internet era, they did exist much earlier -- most definitely as early as the 19th century.
Now, a new discovery from a poetry fan reveals that the smiley may date as early as 1648, when it appeared in a poem called "To Fortune" by Robert Herrick. Found by Levi Stahl, publicity manager for the University of Chicago Press, and first reported by The Atlantic, the poem has a smiley face next to the words "smiling yet."
It could, of course, be a typo, but it could also be deliberate -- after all, the concept of the smiley is pretty simple and could easily be as old as typography itself. However, this doesn't seem to be the case here.
We've checked a couple of other editions of Herrick's poetry including The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick Vol II., Hesperides or Works Both Human and Divine, as well as The Works of Robert Herrick (ed. by T. Maitland), and the smiley doesn't appear in either version.
The New Atlantis chimes in with its analysis, claiming that parentheses weren't widely used in Herrick's time. It's thus likely that the parenthesis was inserted by a modern editor.
While there's still a possibility that Robert Herrick used a smiley in the 17th century, we'll need more solid proof to be sure. For now, emoticons remain a much later invention.