How Text Messaging Took Over the Way We Talk

On December 3, 1992, in Newbury, England, computer scientist Neil Papworth texted two words—“Merry Christmas”—to Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone engineering director, who was across town at a Christmas party. This simple holiday greeting between colleagues was, in fact, a landmark event in the history of telecommunications: Papworth had just sent the first text message.

Texting in the broadest sense—that is, electrically sending words back and forth between people—had arguably been around for nearly 150 years, since Samuel F.B. Morse unveiled his telegraph. But on that wintry English eve, texting began its journey to the heart of our daily experience. Of course, phones still had to catch up: The device Papworth used—the Orbitel 901, an early mobile phone with a blockish and unlovely LCD screen—was a behemoth, a corded clunker that more closely resembled a contemporary landline than a modern cellphone.

In a way, we’d been waiting for SMS—or Short Message Service, the form of texting that Papworth introduced—since Donald Murray added a typewriter keyboard to the telegraph around 1901 to create the teletype machine, which transmitted messages over electrical lines for a small fee, usually at a telegraph or post office. The telex service, which operated over telephone lines, was in operation in Germany as early as 1927 and spread globally in the years after World War II. Telex fell out of favor by the 1970s as fax machines rose in popularity, followed by early computer email systems. 

As the decades went along, we inched closer and closer to uninhibited electronic text messaging—a day Thomas Edison had foreseen with remarkable accuracy as early as 1878. In the future, Edison wrote in an essay, everyday people would send voice messages back and forth using his phonograph in tandem with the newly invented telephone: “The dictation may be as rapid as the thoughts can be formed, or the lips utter them.” It was a vision of leisure, offering the ease of letter-writing at the speed of the telephone. 

That blend of casual simplicity came to an apex in text messaging: Today, the pinnacle of convenience is immediate-yet-asynchronous communication, sending a message when you’re available and waiting for the recipient to respond whenever they can. In recent years, the rise of voice notes, transmissible by text, has arguably brought us even closer to Edison’s original prediction. Meanwhile, text shorthand continues to overrun our vernacular. TTYL. 

Scott Nover | READ MORE

Scott Nover is a journalist covering media and technology.