Emoticon, anno 1862

\"It looks to me like a typo,\" said Scott E. Fahlman, the Carnegie Mellon professor who is credited with being User Zero of the Internet emoticon. \"I can't imagine an editor putting that in and meaning, 'Ha ha,' trying to emphasize what Lincoln had said. That goes beyond the bounds of editorial comment in a piece of reporting like this.\"

However, the Linotype machine, which allowed keyboards to assemble type, were not introduced until the 1880s, noted Vincent Golden, the curator of newspapers and periodicals of the American Antiquarian Society. \"At that time, type was still set piece by piece. So the typesetter would have had to pick up the semicolon and set it in the line then pick up the closed bracket and set it next,\" he explained. \"My gut feeling is it wasn't a typo.\"