1/. In 1958, novelist William Keepers Maxwell, wrote to his friend, Sylvia Warner: “There should be a symbol on the typewriter for a sigh, a deep sigh & for the wringing of the hands.”
Her brother, inventor Emerson “Collywobbles” Warner, saw the letter. In 1959 created the emoji
2/. The modern emoji is thought to have been created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita....40 years after the Collywobbles Sentiment Machine.
Of Kurita’s 176 original emojis, 84 are identical / very similar to the "Collywobbles Emojis". They are housed in @MuseumModernArt in New York.
3/. In 2007, the emoji exhibition at MoMA was vandalised
Many of Kurita’s originals were damaged or destroyed
Grainy CCTV footage shows an old man committing the crime
Some believe it was Warner
A note was left. It read: “‘Father of the emoji’ my ass!”
4/. In 1960, he designed & built a prototype “Collywobbles Sentiment Machine”.
But he couldn’t secure investment.
Even his father, industrialist Tyrone Warner, refused to invest writing to a friend, “Never in all my born days have I come across an idea as singularly imbecilic.”
5/. Turning to friends, Collywobbles raised the $25,000 - equivalent to $220K - necessary to start manufacture
But no one would buy or even stock his machines
He blamed the abject failure on arrival of the electric typewriter
Whatever the reasons, Collywobbles had debts to pay
6/. It’s believed that one of the people Collywobbles had turned to for money was Miroslav Ivanoff
The two had met in Paris in the 1930’s but now Ivanoff was high up in the Politburo.
In 1961, Collywobbles was pictured in Leningrad.
Were the Russians interested in his machine?
7/. This letter found in Moscow’s Rossiyskoy Archive, is from the Kremlin to Ivanoff
It reveals Soviet code breakers examined the Sentiment Machine for 2 months. It concludes “We believe the American gadget is the work a a half-wit.”
“Quarter-wit” Khrushchev has scrawled in pen
8/. Debate rumbles on about whether Collywobbles was ever a US or Russian spy. Some say he was a quadruple agent & would get confused about which side he was on
Last month, I got a Tweet asking about a wartime Hampstead Lido quote I’d posted & about his invention of dough-balls.
9/. “The Blitzkrieg of fire & fury was over & we emerged from our subterranean lockdowns, blinking in the brilliant sunlight. The water stretched out like a long summer & swimming felt like liberation: a form of moving meditation.”
(Emerson “Collywobbles” Warner - London, 1941).
10/. Reading this quote from his 1947 book, “On the skids in Paris, Rome & London”, one is struck by similarities btw lockdown & the Blitz
One is also struck by the similarity of the title to Orwell’s novel
They’d met in Paris & he never forgave Orwell for “stealing” his title.
11/. Collywobbles invented the dough ball when he was down & out in Rome in 1936
He was waiting tables in a trattoria run by a notoriously stingy boss who gave staff one pizza per day, but they had pay for toppings
He couldn’t afford tomato/mozzarella/etc. so he just ate dough.
12/. On his return to America after the war, he patented his recipe & launched “Fluffo’s Global Dough Balls” with financial backing from his old friend, Frank Sinatra
But disaster struck in 1953 when it emerged the woman leading his promotional campaign had a wheat intolerance.
13/. The collapse of “Fluffo’s global dough balls” hit Collywobbles hard
He’d named the company after Olatz Flaffoxea, his lover who “died in his arms” in 1937 during the Siege of the Alcázar where they’d fought for the Popular Front during in the Spanish Civil War. (Pic Magnum)
14/. Ernest Hemingway, who was also Olatz’s lover, disputes Collywobble’s version claiming she died in his arms.
Contemporaneous notes made after the siege by the battalion’s priest, suggest there’d been “an unseemly tussle” between the two men over whose arms she should die in.
15/. I’m currently researching a book about Emerson “Collywobbles” Warner. If you have any stories/info about him, please share it below.
We are also campaigning to turn #WorldEmojiDay (17 July) into #CollywobblesDay & hope MoMA might host an exhibition about his work in 2021.
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