The month of December boasts no less than 14 religious holidays plus the anniversary of the first text message. According to Interesting Engineer, the world’s first text message was sent thirty years ago, on December 3, 1992 by British engineer and developer Neil Papworth. Today, texting is the most widely used cell phone feature.
In the early nineties, Papworth was working for Sema Group Telecom, which developed a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for their customer, Vodafone. SMSC, now known as SMS (or Short Message Service) is a form of text messaging, responsible for sending, receiving, storing, and forwarding messages from mobile devices, reported Interesting Engineer.
The SMS text-based communication tool works by signaling nearby towers over a control channel, directing data to an SMS center. Then, the SMS resends the message to a tower closest to the recipient, appearing on the user’s smartphone.
Although texting has technically been around for three decades, the concept was introduced earlier. In 1984, a Finnish engineer named Matti Makkonen proposed the idea but was turned down, reported Interesting Engineer.
So what did the first text message read? Papworth sent the first text message via a computer to his colleague Richard Jarvis, who was attending a Christmas party. Jarvis received the text, which read “Merry Christmas,” on his five-pound Orbitel 901 handset. And the rest is history. Now, billions of text messages are sent globally, with trillions of text messages sent worldwide every year. Happy texting!
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