December 3, 2012

Today marked the 20th anniversary of a cornerstone of modern communication: text messaging. The first text—or SMS (short for short messaging service)—was sent by a 22-year-old British engineer named Neil Papworth in 1992. He sent it to Richard Jarvis, a colleague at Vodafone, the company that was developing SMS technology. The text read “Merry Christmas.”

Texts are associated with cell phones because the messages travel over the cell phone network. But in 1992, cell phones lacked any way to type letters. Thus, Papworth typed the historic text on a computer. The computer fed into Vodafone’s GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) cell phone network. Richard Jarvis received the message on an Orbitel 901 cell phone.

A young woman types text messages into a mobile phone in this photograph. People often exchange such brief messages when talking on the phone would be rude or inconvenient. (© Dreamstime)

Jarvis’s laptop-sized Orbitel 901, with its tiny gray screen and long, spiraling cord, might be confused for an ancient relic of a bygone civilization compared with the sleek smartphones of today. The lightning-fast evolution and miniaturization of cell phones since 1992 parallels the explosive growth of text messaging. Today, people around the world send trillions of texts each year. Along with such Internet-based communication as instant messaging and the social network website Twitter, text messaging has helped make short, typed messages a part of everyday life.

Additional World Book articles:

• Cyberbullying
• Freedom of speech
• Constant Comment: What’s All the Twitter About? (a Special Report)