The first SMS ever sent said "Merry Christmas" and was sent on December 3, 1992.

Neil Papworth worked for a company called Sema Group in the United Kingdom. He was part of a team building a messaging system for the phone company Vodafone. On December 3, 1992, he typed 15 characters on a computer and sent them to Richard Jarvis, a director at Vodafone.Jarvis received the message on an Orbitel 901 phone. This device was called a transportable phone and weighed 2.1 kilograms (4.6 pounds). The technology used the signaling channel of the phone network. This channel was usually used to tell a phone it had an incoming call.The 160-character limit for texts was decided in 1985 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. They chose this length after counting the characters on postcards and telegrams. It took several years for texting to become popular. In 1995, the average user sent less than one message per month.By 1999, different phone networks finally allowed people to text each other. Before this, you could only text people who used the same phone company. By 2010, people around the world were sending 6.1 trillion messages every year. In 2021, the original message was sold as a digital collectible for over $120,000 to raise money for charity.