Sending text messages has become an integral part of life for most of us. It has become such a common activity that we instinctively reach for our phones and begin tapping out a message rather than placing a voice call. The most common text messages today are, “I love you,” “when will you be home,” and “where are you,” respectively. The birth of our modern text messaging system can be traced back to December 3, 1992.
In 1992, 22-year-old Neil Papworth was working as a software engineer for the now-defunct Anglo-French information technology company Sema Group Telecoms. For about a year and a half, Neil was part of a team that was searching for a way to transmit short text messages for Vodafone, a British telecommunications company. At the time, the only function cell phones could perform consisted of making and receiving telephone calls. Telecommunication companies knew that cell phones had the potential to do more, and they knew adding functions would lead to huge profits. Vodafone wanted to add a pager feature (remember pagers?) into cell phones. Neil and his team spent months testing and troubleshooting the one-way messaging system. The main problem was that they had to create a text messaging system that would interact flawlessly with any cell phone on the market.
Vodafone had invested a lot of money in the system and wanted to show the world that it worked. On December 3, 1992, Neil sat in his office in Newbury, England, hoping that the text messaging system he and his team created would function as expected. After checking and rechecking the team’s programming, Neil typed in the cell number of Richard Jarvis, the director of Vodafone, who was hosting a Christmas party on the other side of town at the time. He typed in a short message and, as he later explained, had two thoughts: “God, I hope this works,” and “what am I going to have for dinner?” Neil explained, “for me, it was just another day at work.” This was far from a random test; Vodafone had planned to reveal their technology to the world at this party if it worked. Vodafone had numerous members of the press present to be sure the word got out. The company had planned every detail of the reveal except for what the text message would say. Without much thought, Neil typed a two-word message and sent it. Because it was a one-way text messaging system and Richard could not send a reply, Neil had to call Richard to ensure that the test was successful. Neil said, “there was a lot of relief when it worked.” By the end of 2000, cell phone users sent an average of 35 text messages per month. Today, users send an average of 52 text messages per day. Neil had no idea that text messaging would make such an impact on our daily lives.
Neil Papworth, the 22-year-old software engineer who helped change the way the world sends and receives information, who is credited with sending the first commercial text message, did not own a cell phone. He bought his first cell phone three or four years later. Although it’s been said many times, many ways, I want to share the same message with you that Neil sent the director of Vodafone. The first commercial text message in history consisted of just two words, “Merry Christmas.”
Sources:
1. The Daily Nonpareil (Council Bluffs, Iowa), June 30, 2006, p.57.
2. Ivan Blagojevic, “23+ Texting Statistics on Modern Messaging Habits,” 99firms, August 11, 2025, https://99firms.com/research/texting-statistics/#gref.
3. “The History of SMS – Neil Papworth w/ Bonin Bough | Messaging Summit 2019,” Bonin Bough, YouTube.com, July 9, 2019, https://youtu.be/odvj7CDGHys?si=cApKpHu6tnQyuTd9.
4. “Meet the Legend Behind the first ‘Merry Christmas’ SMS,” MoreThan160, YouTube.com, December 4, 2023, https://youtu.be/1EQffh6-Y2Y?si=DpndYabbyoLNtHhl.
