The first text message in history said Merry Christmas

On 3 December 1992, Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, was testing a messaging system his company was building for Vodafone. For that afternoon's trial he picked a text worthy of the season: "Merry Christmas".

He typed it on a computer, because there was no other way: the mobile phones of the era could receive those messages, but not write them. The recipient was Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone executive who was at the company Christmas party. The first SMS in history landed on his phone — a device the size of a brick — somewhere between the toasts and the carols.

Jarvis didn't reply. Not out of rudeness: his phone simply couldn't. The first SMS conversation in history was, in truth, a monologue.

Nobody in that room imagined what was coming. For years the SMS remained an engineers' curiosity, until an entire generation discovered that fitting into 160 characters was an art. At its peak, trillions were sent each year.

In 2021, Vodafone auctioned a certified replica of that first message as a collector's item. Someone paid around €107,000 for a "Merry Christmas" that never got an answer.