A Very Important Birthday

December 3rd was the 30th birthday of something that has become near and dear to most of us. Something that most of us do every day, indeed multiple times a day. And probably none of us even bothered to send a card (though a text might have been more appropriate).

Because, on December 3, 1992 the very first text message on a mobile phone was sent.

Neil Papworth, a Vodafone engineer in the United Kingdom, sent a simple two-word message to his boss – “Merry Christmas”.

He did not get a reply.

In the 30 years since SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging has been in use, messaging technology has expanded exponentially. And while users today have a wide range of choices and apps to choose from, SMS still holds an important place in our everyday lives, even among Gen Z.

At its peak, phone users exchanged billions of SMS messages every year, and they’re still going strong. 20% of people still use SMS as their default messaging platform. According to Statistic Brain, today 18.7 billion texts are sent worldwide every day, this doesn’t include app-to-app messaging. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger combine for more than 60 billion messages sent every day.

Originally, an SMS could only be text, up to 160 characters long. The concept was born in the early 1980’s but it was almost 10 years before one would be sent to a mobile device. The idea of creating a network for sending and receiving short messages between cell phones came to Matti Makkonen a few years earlier, in 1984, while he was eating pizza with his friends in Copenhagen.

(Matti never filed a patent for his idea, and therefore received no money for this invention).

At the beginning, the SMS was intended for internal communication of companies, not for the general public. It was in 1997 that mobile operators offered the first SMS services for individuals. And the original 160 character limit happened because a German researcher wrote a series of messages on his typewriter,

then counted the characters in each message. He determined that 160 was a “perfectly sufficient” length.

In 2012, Norwegian Frode Ness made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by recording the fastest time for writing a 160 character text – 34.65 seconds.

Text messaging is now the most used data service in the world. Some interesting/amazing texting facts and figures, courtesy of Experian Marketing:

• The average adult spends 23 hours a week texting

• America is responsible for approximately 45% of the world’s text volume

• Texting takes up 33% of Millennials’ mobile usage

• College students spend 94 minutes a day texting, on average

• About 50% of adults 18-24 say text conversations are just as meaningful as a phone call

• 7% of people asked said they have been dumped via text message.

So, texting has come a long way in the last 30 years (the verb “texting” was entered into the dictionary in 2010). This made us wonder what else was happening in 1992:

• AT&T introduced the video phone, IBM developed the first smartphone, and the 10 millionth cell phone was sold.

• About one million computers worldwide had Internet access, and there were 10 websites online by the end of the year.

• President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin jointly announced that the Cold War had ended (oh well…….)

• The cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad was $850,000. (In 2022, a Super Bowl commercial cost $223,000 per second.)

• Johnny Carson made his last appearance as host of The Tonight Show.

What country are you from and how often do you still text today? Tell us about your best (or otherwise) texting experiences in the comments.

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