Answer: A Holiday Greeting

The first SMS message was delivered on December 3, 1992. The message was crafted on a desktop computer by Neil Papworth, a test engineer for Sema Group, and delivered via the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom to the Orbitel 901 cellphone of Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis. The body of the text message was simply “Merry Christmas.”

While this is the first example of a text message delivered to a phone, the first example of phone-to-phone text messaging would not occur until the next year when Nokia’s SMS capable GSM cellphone line-up, linked by the Radiolinja network in Finland, was released.