History was made on this date in 1992: Engineer Neil Papworth sent this first text message

Just three weeks before Christmas 1992, a milestone in communication history quietly unfolded in Newbury, a small market town in West Berkshire, England.

It was at Vodafone House, the telecommunications company’s UK headquarters, where the very first SMS was sent.

The message was just a simple, seasonal, two-word greeting: “Merry Christmas!”—and was delivered by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old software engineer who had joined Sema Group Telecoms 18 months previously as part of the team developing a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for Vodafone UK.

By the early 90s, cell phone technology had only recently passed over from analog to digital and phones did not have a keyboard. So Papworth sent his trial SMS message from a computer to his colleague Richard Jarvis’s Orbitel 901 mobile phone as part of a test of the new technology.

Jarvis, who was enjoying his office Christmas party, was surprised to become the world’s first recipient of an SMS. While Papworth did not invent text messaging, he played an important part in its development. Simple as it seemed, it was a moment which laid the foundation for the text messaging revolution to come.

How the idea of SMS was born

In 1984, Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen, working at Nokia Networks, first proposed the concept of short text messages at a conference in Copenhagen. He saw them as a practical complement to voice calls.

In 1985, German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand at Deutsche Telekom suggested limiting messages to 160 characters. His research showed greeting cards and voicemail transcripts rarely exceeded that length, making it both logical and technically efficient.

By 1991, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) began developing the framework for SMS. Just one year later, the first message was sent.

How early SMS worked

Mobile phone networks in Europe started switching over to digital in the early 90s for the new GMS (Global System for Mobile Communications) handsets which were about to be rolled out.

SMS piggybacked on GSM signaling channels originally designed for service data transmission, including voice calls.

Messages were encoded in PDU (Protocol Data Unit) format, using 7-bit encoding for Latin characters (up to 160 per message). For languages like Chinese or Arabic, UCS-2 encoding reduced the limit to 70 characters.

SMS centers (SMSC) acted as routers, storing and forwarding messages if the recipient’s phone was unavailable—ensuring reliability even during network hiccups.

Nokia and the rise of texting

While the first SMS was received on an Orbitel 901, Nokia played a pivotal role in popularizing the technology. In 1994, the company launched the Nokia 2010, one of the first phones that allowed users to both send and receive texts. Nokia also helped standardize protocols, ensuring compatibility across devices and carriers.

Initially, SMS adoption was slow. The main reasons being that phones were expensive (the world’s first portable hand phone the Motorola 8000X would have set you back around $3,000), and carriers prioritized voice calls. But by the mid-1990s, operators began including SMS in their plans, and cheaper handsets fueled widespread use.

By the new millennium, texting had exploded, especially among young people. The 160-character limit prompted users to adopt a new shorthand language with included abbreviated classics such as LOL (“laugh out loud”), BRB (“be right back”)—and even early emoji-like face symbols :).

By 2010, the International Telecommunication Union reported more than 6 trillion texts sent worldwide—about 192,000 per second. SMS had become a cultural phenomenon.

The reasons why SMS declined and slipped out of fashion

Several factors pushed users to seek alternatives - the rise of messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Viber offered multimedia, group chats, and unlimited length. Added to that, these new services were often either cheaper than SMS fees or free.

Then there were the limitations such as character caps, lack of encryption, and no multimedia support which made SMS less competitive.

Cultural impact

There is no denying that SMS changed how people communicated—it was much faster, easily accessible, and portable. It shaped youth culture, created a new digital shorthand, and even influenced productivity and attention spans.

The future of SMS

Though less popular today, SMS remains vital for:

SMS endures as a symbol of reliability and simplicity. As for Neil Papworth, he recalls it was three or four years before he even bought a cell phone of his own. His landmark SMS test only came to light, at least with the general public, after he received a surprise phone call from the BBC during a trip to Madrid in 2002, to interview him on the 10th anniversary of his “Merry Christmas” SMS.

From Papworth’s “Merry Christmas” to billions of daily texts, it proved that even the simplest ideas can transform the world.

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