It’s largely accepted that the original version of the familiar smiley face was first created in Worcester, Massachusetts by the late Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist and ad man.  Ball came up with the image in 1963 when he was commissioned to create a graphic to raise morale among the employees of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions.  Ball finished the design in less than 10 minutes and was paid $45 for his work.  The State Mutual Life Assurance Company (now Allmerica Financial Corporation) made posters, buttons, and signs adorned with the jaundiced grin in the attempt to get their employees to smile more.  It’s uncertain whether or not the new logo boosted morale, but the smiling face was an immediate hit and the company produced thousands of buttons.  The image proliferated and was of course endlessly imitated but according to Bill Wallace, Executive Director of the Worcester Historical Museum, the authentic Harvey Ball-designed smiley face could always be identified by its distinguishing features:  the eyes are narrow ovals, one larger than the other, and the mouth is not a perfect arc but “almost like a Mona Lisa Mouth.”  Neither Ball nor State Mutual tried to trademark or copyright the design.  Although it seems clear that Ball has the strongest claim to the second most iconic smile in history, there’s much more to the story.  In the early 1970s, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, owners of two Hallmark card shops in Philadelphia, came across the image in a button shop, noticed that it was incredibly popular, and simply appropriated it.  They knew that Harvey Ball came up with the design in the 1960s but after adding the slogan “Have a Happy Day” to the smile, the Brothers Spain were able to copyright the revised mark in 1971, and immediately began producing their own novelty items.  By the end of the year they had sold more than 50 million buttons and countless other products, turning a profit.  Despite their acknowledgment of Harvey’s design, the brothers publicly took credit for icon in 1971 when they appeared on the television show “What’s My Line.”  In Europe, there is another claimant to the smiley.  In 1972 French journalist Franklin Loufrani became the first person to register the mark for commercial use when he started using it to highlight the rare instances of good news in the newspaper France Soir.  Subsequently, he trademarked the smile, dubbed simply “Smiley,” in over 100 countries and launched the Smiley Company by selling smiley T-shirt transfers.  In 1996, Loufrani’s son Nicolas took over the family business and transformed it into an empire.  He formalized the mark with a style guide and further distributed it through global licensing agreements including, perhaps most notably, some of the earliest graphic emoticons.  Today, the Smiley Company makes more than $130 million a year and is one of the top 100 licensing companies of the world.  The company has taken a simple graphic gesture and transformed it into an enormous business as well as a corporate ideology that places a premium on “positivity.”  As for the American origin of the smiley, Nicolas Loufrani is skeptical of Harvey’s claim on the design even though, as evident in the above image, his father’s original newspaper icon is almost identical to Ball’s mark, idiosyncrasies and all.  Loufrani argues that the design of the smiley is so basic it can’t be credited to anyone.  On his company’s website, they prove this idea by showing what they claim to be the world’s first smiley face, a stone carving found in a French cave that dates to 2500 BC, as well as a smiley face graphic used for promotion by a New York radio station in 1960.  Copyright and trademark issues are complicated, and despite their views toward Ball’s design, when the Smiley Company attempted to trademark the image in the United States in 1997, they became embroiled in a legal battle with Walmart, which started using the smiley face as a corporate logo in 1996 and tried to claim ownership of it (because of course they did.)  The law suit lasted 10 years and cost both companies millions of dollars.  It was settled out of court in 2007 but its terms remain undisclosed.

Jimmy Stamp  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/who-really-invented-the-smiley-face-2058483/

A Super Ball (a.k.a. SuperBall) is a toy bouncing ball based on a type of synthetic rubber invented in 1964 by chemist Norman Stingley.  It is an extremely elastic ball made of Zectron which contains the synthetic polymer polybutadiene as well as hydrated silica, zinc oxide, stearic acid, and other ingredients.  This compound is vulcanized with sulfur at a temperature of 165 °C and formed at a pressure of 3500 psi.  The resulting Super Ball has a very high coefficient of restitution, and if dropped from shoulder level on a hard surface, a Super Ball bounces nearly all the way back; thrown down by an average adult, it can leap over a three-story building.  Toys similar to Super Balls are more generally known as bouncy balls, a term that covers other balls by different manufacturers with different formulations.  Stingley sought uses for is Polybutadiene synthetic rubber, as well as someone to manufacture it.  He first offered his invention to the Bettis Rubber Company, for whom he worked at the time, but they turned it down because the material was not very durable.  So Stingley took it to toy company Wham-O; they worked on developing a more durable version which they still manufacture today.  "It took us nearly two years to iron the kinks out of Super Ball before we produced it," said Richard Knerr, President of Wham-O in 1966.  "It always had that marvelous springiness . . . But it had a tendency to fly apart.  We've licked that with a very high-pressure technique for forming it.  Now we're selling millions."  Super Ball became a fad when it was introduced.  Peak production reached over 170,000 Super Balls per day.  By December 1965, over six million had been sold, and U.S. Presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy had five dozen shipped to the White House for the amusement of the staff.   Initially, the full-sized Super Ball sold for 98¢ at retail; by the end of 1966, its colorful miniature versions sold for as little as 10¢ in vending machines.  In the late 1960s, Wham-O made a giant Super Ball roughly the size of a bowling ball as a promotional stunt.  It fell from the 23rd story window (some reports say the roof) of an Australian hotel and destroyed a parked convertible car on the second bounce.  Composer Alcides Lanza purchased several Super Balls in 1965 as toys for his son, but soon he started experimenting with the sounds that they made when rubbed along the strings of a piano.  This resulted in his composition Plectros III (1971), in which he specifies that the performer should use a pair of Super Balls on sticks as mallets with which to strike and rub the strings and case of a piano.  Lamar Hunt, founder of the American Football League and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, watched his children playing with a Super Ball and then coined the term Super Bowl.  He wrote a letter to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle dated July 25, 1966:  "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."  The league's franchise owners had decided on the name AFL-NFL World Championship Game, but the media immediately picked up on Hunt's Super Bowl name, which became official beginning with the third annual game in 1969.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Ball

Thomas Edison received many patents in countries other than the United States.  No complete list exists, but Dyer and Martin's 1910 biography, Edison:  His Life and Inventions, contains a compilation of 1,239 non-U.S. patents awarded in 34 countries.  Edison's British patents for the years 1872–1880 appear in a bound volume in the Charles Batchelor collection.  There is an on-line database of all U.S. patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  Patents before 1975 are searchable by patent number and classification, and patents issued between 1790 and 1836—which were not numbered—have been assigned chronologically ordered "X" numbers.  The USPTO also hosts a great deal of information about current patent practice. Databases at the Delphion Intellectual Property Network include U.S. patents since 1971, European patents since 1980, and Japanese patent abstracts since 1976.  U.S. Patents can also be searched through Google Patents.  Edison executed the first of his 1,093 successful U.S. patent applications on 13 October 1868, at the age of 21.  He filed an estimated 500–600 unsuccessful or abandoned applications as well.  Unfortunately, the names given Edison's patents are too irregular to make simple word searches an accurate means of finding patents for particular technologies.  His issued patents are presented here in three lists—by execution date, patent date, and subject. The execution and patent date lists are each presented in six parts to make the files less cumbersome.  The execution date of a patent application is the date on which the inventor signs the application, and hence is the date closest to the actual inventive activity.  However, in his early years Edison did not always rush to his patent lawyer with an invention, especially if there was little competition for the invention or he was feeling broke and unable to pay the various fees involved in an application.  In a few cases Edison removed some of the claims from an original application and filed a new application to cover those claims.  The execution date of such a patent can be considerably later than that of the original application even though the patent covers designs from the earlier date.  Link to more information at https://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm

Just when you thought attempting to trademark the word “The” was the greatest length Ohio State could reach in attempting to shield its precious brand, the school went ahead and picked a fight over a single letter.  Overtime Sports Inc., an online sports network, sued Ohio State University in federal court on December 23, 2019 after the school attempted to block the company from trademarking its letter “O” logo, according to the Associated Press.  Ohio State reportedly asked Overtime in July to stop using the logo, claiming it was too similar to its own trademarked block “O.”  In response, Overtime filed a lawsuit in New York City, where the company is based, to request that the school be prohibited from attempting to stop Overtime from using its logo.  Overtime’s trademark application is still reportedly pending at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  Jack Baer  https://sports.yahoo.com/ohio-state-overtime-block-o-lawsuit-trademark-235932616.html

Mariah Carey is the first artist ever to top the Billboard charts in four decades--and it's all thanks to her Christmas classic.  The elusive chanteuse scored a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s and now, the 2020s.  "All I Want For Christmas Is You," originally released in 1994, is one of the very first hits of the new decade, Billboard confirmed.  The Billboard Hot 100 data combines radio airplay, sales and streaming data, and the latter measure likely boosted Carey's song to the top.  Scottie Andrew  https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/01/entertainment/mariah-carey-first-artist-billboard-four-decades-trnd/index.html

Starting on Jan. 1, 2020, anyone can legally remix George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, screen Buster Keaton’s silent films, or publish their own edition of Agatha Christie’s whodunnit The Man in the Brown Suit.  These classics are among the hundreds of books, films, novels, maps, music, and art created in 1924 that will enter the public domain come 2020.  Broadly speaking, copyright protection expires in the US after 95 years.  Anne Quito  Find list of works entering public domain at https://qz.com/1777256/list-of-copyrighted-works-entering-the-public-domain-in-2020/

The full lyrics to 'Auld Lang Syne' so you don't mumble your way through it  Elizabeth Wolfe and Kendall Trammell  Updated 7:02 AM ET, Tue December 31, 2019

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/31/us/auld-lang-syne-history-lyrics-trnd/index.html

LEFT IN 2019  Syd Mead (visual futurist designer), John Havlicek (Boston Celtic great), Leah Chase (chef and civil rights activist), John Paul Stevens, (U.S. Supreme Court justice), Howard “Hopalong” Cassady (Heisman Trophy winner at Ohio State and running back for the Detroit Lions), Elijah E. Cummings (U.S. House of Representatives member), Betty Ballantine ( half of a husband-and-wife team that helped invent the modern paperback), Monkey Punch (cartoonist), Leonard Bailey (doctor who planted a baboon heart into a newborn baby), I.M. Pei (architect), Cokie Roberts (journalist), Gahan Wilson (cartoonist), and Caroll Spinney (played Big Bird and gave Oscar the Grouch his growl). 

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. - E.M. Forster, novelist (1 Jan 1879-1970)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2204  January 2, 2020