Imagine a time before text messaging existed. Depending on your age, it might seem unreal. But the good old SMS hasn’t actually been around very long. On 3 December 1992, a man called Neil Papworth stunned the world by sending the first ever text message. 

The 22-year-old software programmer used his computer to send a simple “Merry Christmas” to his colleague’s mobile phone across town, and our lives were never the same again. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind indeed.

Since then, trillions of texts are sent every year. And if it weren’t for Papworth and his team, we might never have been able to enjoy some of the hilarious gems seen here.

Some of these texts are so funny a few people might even be willing to pay for them… And it wouldn’t be the first time a text message is sold. In 2021, Vodafone sold Papworth’s first historic sms for more than 115,000 Dollars. The text was turned into a Non Fungible Token and auctioned in Paris. More on NFTs here. 

“The selling of intangible goods is not legal in France and so the auction house has packaged the text message in a digital frame, displaying the code and communication protocol,” the auction house told Reuters at the time. The proceeds of the auction were donated to the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR.

Just so we’re clear, Papworth did not invent the sms. “I simply sent the first text message,” he wrote on his website. “The Short Message Service (SMS) was defined by the GSM Association. I helped develop and test the software, got it working on site, and had the honor of sending the first one to prove that it was working!”

GSM had begun working on a text message system in the 1980s, long before Papworth hit send. It was meant to be a way for networks to communicate with their clients. “Initially the idea was for them to use it essentially as a paging service - no-one had any idea how gigantic the texting phenomenon would become,” wrote Papworth. And what a phenomenon it’s become…

Studies show Americans check their phones around 96 times a day. That’s once every ten minutes. And Forbes reported that around 270,000 text messages are sent every second!

When Papworth sent that first sms from a computer, his colleague could not reply. It was another year before Nokia started making mobile phones that could send and receive text messages. “Texting didn't really take off until some years later, once handsets were able to both send and receive and people could send SMS to their friends on different networks,” said Papworth.

And when texting did take off, there was concern it’d take the English language with it. Text messaging quickly paved the way for a whole new lingo. And some were left scratching their heads when stuff like “HBD! CU L8er… Btw, BYOB” popped up on their screens.

One research paper explained it like this: "When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever)."

A student called Hetty Hughes won the equivalent of over a thousand dollars for this piece of writing in 2001:

“txtin iz messin,

mi headn'me englis,

try2rite essays,

they all come out txtis.

gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,

swears i wrote better

b4 comin2uni.

&she's african”

How many times did you have to read that before it made sense? Your answer might well determine your age.

While textese got some traditionalists hot under the collar, it turns out textisms didn’t come about because of laziness. “At first, text messages had a 160-character limit. Early adopters got round this by inventing ‘txt spk’, such as LOL (laughing out loud) and emoticons - symbols made from keyboard characters to show emotions,” explained Vodafone on their website.

And TBH, IDK but IMO, if it weren’t for the LOLs, our beloved emojis might not be around today…

While some were worried textese could dumb down the younger generation, others weren't. The poem Hughes wrote was actually one of 7,500 entries sent to The Guardian for its text poetry competition. The aim was “to turn text messaging into a creative force.” And to see who could be the most creative, using just 160 characters.

In 2016, a bunch of Dutch researchers got together and looked at findings from a range of studies on the subject. They noted that several showed “children who used textese frequently did not perform poorly on spelling and tasks measuring literacy abilities.”

After completing their own research, they found “Not only may textese improve children’s abilities in written language, as has been attested in previous work, it may also enhance their grammar abilities in spoken language.”