Can you count how many messages you write a day? Probably not. But the world's first SMS was just two words, and its date is known exactly: December 3, 1992. What's more, this message wasn't typed on a phone but on a computer, and its recipient couldn't reply.
Let's look at this quiet beginning of messaging. Because this story has an engineer, a Christmas party, a heavy phone and an auction 29 years later.
From a computer to a phone
The first SMS was sent by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old British engineer. Papworth was a developer and test engineer at a company called Sema Group, and his team was building a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for Vodafone UK. In other words, they were testing the infrastructure that would carry messages between phones.
Papworth typed the message on a personal computer. According to NPR, mobile phones at the time couldn't send messages yet, only receive them. The message went over Vodafone's GSM network in the United Kingdom.
The recipient was Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis. Jarvis was at an office Christmas party at the time and read the message on his Orbitel 901 phone. According to NPR, this phone weighed more than 4.5 pounds (about 2 kg).
"Merry Christmas" and the unanswered message
The content of the message suited the season: "Merry Christmas". In an interview with NPR, Papworth underlines one detail: "The first message was Merry Christmas spelled with the full words, not X-mas. It was Christmas." In other words, the message was written out in full words without abbreviation.
Why "Merry Christmas"? Papworth's answer to CBC is plain: if a more meaningful message had been written, people would have read into it, whereas this one has "no other meaning". That day he wasn't thinking of making history, only of doing his job. In his own words, the aim was to make sure the software the team had been developing for about a year worked properly. "It didn't feel momentous at all," he says.
So what did Jarvis reply? Nothing. According to NPR, Jarvis read the message but didn't answer it, because phones of that era couldn't write replies. The first SMS in history thus stayed "seen". An unanswered message makes us uneasy today, but not getting a reply to the first message was completely normal. Papworth still wasn't left without feedback. As he told CBC, a few seconds after sending the message, thumbs-ups came from colleagues who knew the system was working.
2021: the first SMS becomes an NFT
The most unexpected part of the story came 29 years later. Vodafone put this first message up for auction as an NFT (non-fungible token). According to Euronews, the sale took place on December 21, 2021 at the Aguttes auction house in Paris, and the message sold for 107,000 euros (about $120,600).
The buyer was described as a Canadian working in the tech sector whose identity wasn't disclosed. Vodafone announced that it would donate the proceeds to the UN refugee agency. So a two-word test message that was never answered ended up becoming a charity campaign. The idea of selling a message's "original" may sound odd, but in 2021, when the NFT craze peaked, this sale made headlines as one of the most interesting examples of how digital objects can also be collectibles.
| 1992 | Today |
|---|---|
| The message was typed on a computer | Everyone types on their phone |
| The recipient couldn't reply | Instant replies, emoji, voice messages |
| A phone of about 2 kg | A smartphone that fits in a pocket |
| Two words: "Merry Christmas" | Countless messages a day |
A modest inventor
The sweetest part may be Papworth himself. According to Wikipedia, in 2017 he said he sends only a few messages a day, finds his messages "quite boring" and doesn't use the emoji menu. The man who sent the world's first SMS is today one of the calmest users of messaging. According to CBC, he now lives in Longueuil in the Canadian province of Quebec.
That two-word test message became the beginning of the everyday communication style of billions of people. But that day nobody thought it was a historic moment; a system was just being tested.
Do you remember the first message on your phone, and who you wrote to?