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By: HISTORY.com Editors
On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.
Papworth, while working for the now-defunct Anglo-French IT services company Sema Group Telecoms, was part of a team developing a “Short Message Service Centre” (SMSC) for the British telecommunications company Vodafone UK. At the time, Sema Group hoped to use these short messages as a paging service. After Papworth installed the system at a site west of London, he sat at a computer terminal and sent the simple message to the mobile phone of Richard Jarvis, director of Vodafone, who was attending a holiday party.
The census has been around since the beginning of the United States, which meant the entire population had to be counted by hand. Until one inventor saw a better way forward.
“It didn't feel momentous at all,” Papworth later said. “For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."
Shortly after, Papworth received a call from the Christmas party, letting him know that the outgoing message was a success, although cellphones themselves could not actually send messages in return yet.
One year later, Nokia released the first cellphone with an SMS feature, but messages (limited to 160 characters due to bandwidth constraints) could only be sent within the same mobile network—phone networks would finally allow users to SMS across rival companies in 1999. Texting as a means of casual communication blossomed with the introduction of the Tegic (T9) system of predictive texting and pre-paid phone plans, which originally did not charge for texts and appealed to young people. Because of the 160-character constraint, as well as the cumbersome nature of typing with a numeric keypad, an entire “language” of abbreviations and slang emerged through SMS and spread across internet-based messaging.
In the United Kingdom, the birthplace of texting, SMS messaging exploded in popularity—by February 2001, about one billion texts were being sent every month, and users were being charged 10 pence a text, generating about £100 million a month in corporate profits. By 2010, the International Telecommunications Union reported that 200,000 text messages were being sent every minute, but by 2012, texting across the world began to see a steady decline, with messages from instant-messaging apps concurrently spiking.
Take a closer look at the inventions that have transformed our lives far beyond our homes (the steam engine), our planet (the telescope), and our wildest dreams (the Internet).
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Discover more of the major events, famous births, notable deaths and everything else history-making that happened on December 3rd
Illinois achieves full statehood on this day. Though Illinois presented unique challenges to immigrants unaccustomed to the soil and vegetation of the area, it grew to become a bustling and densely populated state. The prairie lands east of the Mississippi and west of Lake Michigan were inhabited for generations by the Illinois nation, a confederation […]
Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro sign an armistice with Turkey, ending the fighting in the first Balkan War. During the two-month conflict, a military coalition between Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro—known as the Balkan League—expelled Turkey from all the Ottoman Empire’s former European possessions, with the exception of Constantinople (now Istanbul). In January 1913, a […]
The first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams’ iconic play "A Streetcar Named Desire," starring Marlon Brando, opens on Broadway.
On December 3, 1967, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky receives the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who trained at […]
Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on December 3, 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside. It would be one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. The general-admission ticketing policy […]
On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. “When you buy any other car,” ads said, “all you end up […]
An explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984, leads to the worst industrial accident in history. Decades later, the official death toll remains disputed. At least 5,000 people died immediately, according to official estimates, approximately 20,000 died over time, and another half-million were injured when toxic gas enveloped […]
Five-year-old Melissa Brannen disappears without a trace from a Christmas party in Fairfax, Virginia. The intensive forensic investigation that followed led to the arrest of party guest Caleb Hughes and, in the process, demonstrated how technically advanced crime solving had become. After interviewing everyone who had been at the party, investigators determined that Hughes had […]
Meeting off the coast of Malta, President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issue statements strongly suggesting that the long-standing animosities at the core of the Cold War might be coming to an end. Commentators in both the United States and Russia went farther and declared that the Cold War was over. The talks […]
At its height, the USSR comprised of more than a dozen republics stretching across Europe and Asia. After the collapse, each forged a different path.
The son of the famous president died in the 1999 accident, along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette.
In the 1990s, eight adventurers spent two years separated from the rest of the world inside a futuristic greenhouse meant to mimic a spaceship—on Earth.
From Stalin's reign of terror to Gorbachev and glasnost, meet the eight leaders who presided over the USSR.
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