Whose Idea Was the Text Message?

Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert helped design the Short Message Service as part of the GSM mobile standard. Hillebrand reportedly settled on the 160-character limit after testing typical messages and postcards on a typewriter. On 3 December 1992, 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS, reading 'Merry Christmas', from a computer to a Vodafone director's phone in Britain. Early phones could not send texts, only receive them. By the 2000s, trillions of text messages were being sent worldwide each year.