1933 – RCA Communications, New York introduced the first "telex" service.[1] The first messages over

RCA transatlantic circuits were sent between New York and London. Seven million words or 300,000

radiograms transmitted the first year.[citation needed]

The first text message ever sent was "Merry Christmas". This text was sent from a PC to a friend at a

holiday party across town in London. The concept of the SMS (Short Messaging Service) was created by

Friedhelm Hillebrand. Sitting at a typewriter at home, Hillebrand typed out random sentences and counted

every letter, number, punctuation, and space. Almost every time, the messages amounted to 160

characters, thus being the basis for the limit one could type via text.

(http://theweek.com/article/index/237240/the-text-message-turns-20-a-brief-history-of-sms)

Alphanumeric messages have long been sent by radio using via Radiotelegraphy.[2] Digital information

began being sent using radio as early as 1971 by the University of Hawaii using ALOHAnet.[citation

needed] Matti Makkonen has been referred to in different contexts as the "father of text messaging" but he

rejects this epithet. "The SMS function is the result of extensive and open international cooperation, and

GSM documents prove that it is based on the Franco-German proposal," he says. This proposal was

developed by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. The first technical solution was developed in

a GSM subgroup under the leadership of Finn Trosby. It was further developed under the leadership of

Kevin Holley and Ian Harris (see Wikipedia: Short Message Service).[3]

SMS messaging was used for the first time on 3 December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test

engineer for Sema Group in the UK[4] (now Airwide Solutions),[5] used a personal computer to send the

text message "Merry Christmas" via theVodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.[6][7]

Modern SMS text messaging is understood to be messaging from one mobile phone to another mobile

phone. Radiolinja became the first network to offer commercial person-to-person SMS text messaging

service in 1994. When Radiolinja's domestic competitor, Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) also

launched SMS text messaging in 1995 and the two networks offered cross-network SMS functionality,

Finland became the first nation where SMS text messaging was offered as a competitive as well as

commercial basis.[citation needed]

The first text messaging service in the United States was provided by American Personal

Communications (APC), the first GSM carrier in America. Sprint Telecommunications Venture, a

partnership of Sprint Corp. and three large cable TV companies, owned 49 percent of APC. The Sprint

venture was the largest single buyer at a government-run spectrum auction that raised $7.7 billion in 2005

for PCS licenses. APC operated under the brand name of Sprint Spectrum and launched service on

November 15, 1995 in Washington D.C. and Baltimore Maryland. The initial call to launch the network

was made from Vice President Al Gore in Washington, D.C. to Mayor Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore.[8] Soon

to follow was Omnipoint Communications.[9] George Schmitt, a former Airtouch executive[10] who launched

commercial GSM in Germany, recruited Roger Wood[11] from competitor iDEN / Nextel lead a team that

introduced texting as a commercial service in New York City in November 1996.[9] In preparation for the

company's launch party in New York's Central Park, Wood and co-worker Mark Caron[12] sent the first

SMS Text message of "George are you there?" to Schmitt during a Sunday morning RF drive test on

October 20, 1996. Omnipoint soon offered the first texting between the U.S. and the rest of the world.[13] The tipping point for text messaging was the 1998 marketing plan conceived by Wood which

encouraged consumers to use texting as the primary way to communicate with their home countries while

traveling overseas instead of calling home.[14] This positioning set the stage for text messaging as the

primary means of contact between two or more people not in their home countries.[15]

Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 message

per GSM customer per month.[16] One factor in the slow take-up of SMS was that operators were slow to

set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud, which was

possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over

time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within

SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it.[citation needed]

SMS is available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks. However, not all text messaging

systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-

Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as

popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode and the RIM BlackBerry, also typically use standard mail protocols

such as SMTP over TCP/IP.[17]

Today, text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users

worldwide, or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers, at end of 2007 being active users of the

Short Message Service. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway, over 85% of the population

use SMS. The European average is about 80%, and North America is rapidly catching up with over 60%

active users of SMS by end of 2008. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone

subscribers is in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber.