The real story
In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita, then in his mid-twenties, was working on i-mode, NTT Docomo's new mobile internet service in Japan. Messages were short and screens were tiny, so he designed 176 small pictures on a 12×12 grid, drawing on manga, weather-forecast symbols and street signs: sun, umbrella, a shoe, faces, and a heart.
Other Japanese phone companies built their own sets, and in 2010 emoji were added to Unicode, the standard that lets computers everywhere show the same characters. That's how they spread worldwide. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Kurita's original 176 and showed them in its lobby. Today the red heart is one of the most-used emoji in the world.
