First text message

Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS, reading 'Merry Christmas', from a computer to a phone on the Vodafone network on 3 December 1992.

Context

Neil Papworth was a young software engineer working for Sema Group, a contractor that was building a short message service centre for Vodafone in Britain. To test it, he typed the message on a computer and sent it to a mobile phone belonging to a Vodafone director who was at a Christmas party.

The phone could receive the message but could not send replies, because handsets of that time had no way to type text easily. Text messaging only became popular years later, as phones gained keypads suited to it and networks began to connect with each other.

The idea of SMS had been developed within European standards work in the 1980s, so Papworth was the first person to send one over a live network rather than its inventor. The date of 3 December 1992 is widely reported, and the original message was later auctioned for charity in 2021 as a digital token. Early SMS messages were limited to 160 characters, a limit that came from the design of the signalling system and that shaped the short style of texting for decades. The original message was reported as a seasonal greeting sent to a colleague, and its short length reflects how basic the first service was.