Mondo Knows Facts

The first SMS text message sent in 1992 wished Merry Christmas

Engineer Neil Papworth sent the text message from a personal computer to an Orbitel mobile phone

On 3 December 1992, British engineer Neil Papworth transmitted the world's first Short Message Service text from a computer to a mobile phone on the Vodafone network. The message read Merry Christmas, as mobile handsets at the time had no alphanumeric keyboards for typing text. SMS went on to become a primary medium for global digital messaging.

IPhone Text Message Amber Alert 1882467856 o
Tony Webster · CC BY-SA 3.0 · licence · source

Where this comes from

Vodafone Group

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

More facts like this

Tags: sms, telecoms, messaging

The first SMS text message sent in 1992 wished Merry Christmas: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Engineer Neil Papworth sent the text message from a personal computer to an Orbitel mobile phone. The figure is taken from Vodafone Group, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?
Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?
The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.