On this day in (engineering) history…

December 3, 1992 - A test engineer for Sema Group sends the world's first text message

Ho, ho, ho…

It is the season for Christmas office parties when a young software engineer sits at his desktop PC terminal, writing code, something that has never been done before. He is writing a Christmas greeting. At an office party, a mobile phone rings, and the owner sees a message – ‘Merry Christmas.’

The phone’s owner, who is at the company Christmas party, calls his software engineer to tell him he has succeeded in sending the world’s first SMS – or ‘text’ message. But curiously, it will take until the end of the decade for the texting revolution to really take off.

The software engineer was Neil Papworth, almost 23 years old and working for Sema Group. He happened to be working on developing and installing a “Short Message Service Centre” (SMSC) for Vodafone, at a site outside of London.

Richard Jarvis was Vodafone’s Managing Director at the time and found himself at the company Christmas party when The Message arrived. Richard was forced to make a phone call to respond, because his Orbitel 901 mobile phone, like all mobile phones at the time, lacked the ability to send a message. In fact, Neil’s phone lacked a keyboard, which is why he sent it using a PC.

Before writing the message

Like so many inventions that appear to arrive out of the blue, that first Short Messaging Service (SMS) message was the result of a process of innovation, but also a bureaucratic decision.

The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) decided that services available to regular telephone networks should also be available to the mobile system, with the addition of a messaging service. This gave birth to the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM, aka Global System for Mobile Communications) which was approved in 1982.

  A typical SMS or 'text' message. Source: Wikimedia

In 1984, a Franco-German GSM project led by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert created the concept of the SMS. The chair of the Non-Voice Services Committee of the GSMC, Hillebrand’s research found the regular length of a short message was 140 characters (the basis for Twitter / X’s original character length for its mini-blogs). He chose to set the length of an SMS to 160 characters.

How did they do it back then?

Back in the day, wireless networks were used by car phones, so the messages would have to be short and snappy. What channel to use? Hillebrand realised it could be done over an unused part of the existing mobile network, a secondary radio channel. It already carried data for incoming calls, as well as signal strength, but not the voice call itself - otherwise it was open to other uses.

By reducing the number of characters (letters, numbers, and signals) to be sent in each message, Hillebrand’s team could squeeze 160 characters into the channel.

Pressing ‘send’

When Neil Papworth sent that first message to Richard Jarvis, he was simply testing software and hardware. Richard’s Orbitel 901 was a new model, but couldn’t respond.

Nokia introduced an SMS capability with ‘beep’ alert for incoming messages in 1993, when it was the only manufacturer that fully supported GMS in its user network. That year it produced the Nokia 2010, the first phone to allow users to send text messages. In the UK, the catch was that it could only respond to other phones on the same network, something that changed in 1999.

SMS messaging (‘text messaging’ or ‘texting’) became a social phenomenon around the world, especially in Britain, Finland, and the Philippines, but less so in the US. Europe alone had sent 4 billion text messages by January 2000. By the end of 2007 (the year of the iPhone), messaging overtook voice calls as the primary method of communication between mobile phone customers.

In the UK, where the first text message was sent, mobile SMS was overtaken by web based messenger services in 2014. Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp now have a popularity the SMS once had.

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How did you get into texting…and what difference did it make to your life?

By Stephen Phillips - IET Content Producer, with passions for history, engineering, tech and the sciences.