57 Funny People Who Clearly Planned Their Texts Three Moves Ahead

Before texting became the effortless back-and-forth we know today, long-distance communication was a whole ordeal. The telegraph, invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1835, was the closest thing humanity had to instant messaging for most of the 19th century.

It worked by sending electric pulses along wires, those pulses representing letters and numbers that could be decoded at the other end. The first message ever sent traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. Revolutionary for its time, sure, but nobody was shooting off a quick “you up?” and getting a response in seconds.

It wasn’t until more than a century later that the groundwork for modern texting was laid, and it started with a man at a typewriter.

In 1984, a German engineer named Friedhelm Hillebrand sat down and typed out random sentences, counting every single character as he went. He noticed that almost every message he typed came in under 160 characters, and that number became the foundation for SMS as we know it.

Together with Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom, he brought the idea to a GSM meeting in Oslo in February 1985, and from there it was only a matter of time before the world could start typing to each other.

The first text message was sent on December 3, 1992, when a 22-year-old test engineer named Neil Papworth typed “Merry Christmas” from a computer to Richard Jarvis, who was at a party celebrating the occasion.

Papworth later said it didn’t feel momentous at all, which tracks, because Jarvis couldn’t even text back. His brick-sized Orbitel 901 phone had no way of inputting text. So the very first text exchange in history was a one-sided holiday greeting with zero response. Honestly, a relatable experience for many of us.

From there, things moved pretty quickly. Nokia debuted the first mobile phone capable of sending texts in 1993, though early messages could only travel between people on the same network.

T9 predictive text arrived in 1995, making it slightly less painful to type on a numerical keypad, and Nokia introduced the first phone with a full keyboard in 1997.

By 1999, texts could finally cross networks, and the technology started spreading like wildfire, particularly among college students who loved how cheap and fast it was.

The growth was staggering once people got a taste of it. Americans were sending around 35 texts per month in 2000, a figure that seems almost laughably small now. By 2002, more than 250 billion SMS messages were being sent worldwide.

In 2006, Twitter, now known as X, launched as a text-based service, with its original 140-character limit borrowed directly from Hillebrand’s SMS research. And by 2007, the number of texts sent by Americans in a single month had officially surpassed the number of phone calls made. Texting had finally taken over.

Today, 90 percent of Americans say they prefer texting to phone calls, and 95 percent of texts are read and responded to within three minutes of being received. That kind of immediacy would have been unimaginable to someone sending a telegraph in 1844 and waiting days for a reply.

For all the people who have ever fired off an embarrassing message they immediately wished they could unsend, the telegraph era might sound appealing in hindsight, but at least now we get a daily dose of entertainment.

As texting took hold, it also started reshaping language itself. Abbreviations like brb, idc, and istg became part of everyday vocabulary, born largely out of necessity when typing on a phone with buttons required pressing each key multiple times just to get a single letter.

Some scholars argued that this abbreviated style was damaging people’s ability to spell and write properly. Whether that’s entirely fair is debatable, but there’s no question that texting created its own dialect, one that has since filtered into emails, social media, and even spoken conversation.

There were also concerns about what texting was doing to social skills, particularly for younger generations who were growing up with it. The worry was that teenagers would lose their ability to hold face-to-face conversations if so much of their interaction happened through a screen.

It’s hard to say how much of that fear came true in a dramatic way, but it’s also hard to ignore that plenty of adults today would rather order food through an app than speak to another human being on the phone. Texting didn’t ruin socializing exactly, but it did give a lot of people a very comfortable exit from it.

The darker side of texting’s rise came on the road. A 2009 Car and Driver study found that drivers were more distracted when texting than when driving drunk, and a Pew Research survey that same year found that 26 percent of American teenagers had texted behind the wheel. By 2024, cell phone use was linked to 12.1 percent of fatal car crashes among teen drivers.

Washington became the first state in the U.S. to ban texting while driving back in 2007, and by 2015, 44 states along with several U.S. territories had similar laws in place. It turned out that the same technology making it easier than ever to stay connected was also making one of the most dangerous things people do every day even more dangerous.

It’s clear that texting has come a long way. What started as an idea that popped into the head of one person sitting at a typewriter in the 1980s is now the dominant way we communicate with each other.

But as with anything that spreads that fast and that far, the benefits have come with real dangers attached. Whether the whole thing reads as progress or a cautionary tale is entirely up to you.