Merry Christmas’ may not be the most original greeting in the world, Neil Papworth admits today, but as he was about to send the world’s first text message to a cellphone, it struck him as fittingly festive, certainly more so than “Mr. Watson, come here,” the first words spoken over the telephone.

Besides, Richard Jarvis, the man at the receiving end of the transmission, was at a Christmas party near Vodafone headquarters in Newbury, England, when the mother of all text messages was about to land 15 years ago this week.

Since cellphones were not yet designed to type out and send individual letters of the alphabet, Papworth, then a 22-year-old engineer, sent the historic greeting to Jarvis’s phone from a computer keyboard.

It took another couple of years before cellphones were made to send text easily, more time to work out billing deals and systems among phone companies. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, billions of text messages fly through the airwaves every day and they are a bedrock of revenue and profit for the world’s telecommunications companies. They have inspired their own shorthand in languages written around the world. Some relationships live and die on the strength of the 160-character, thumb-typed phone texts.

The texting cult

Although textos still convey holiday greetings, New Year is the busiest texting day of the year. Text messages also are used to vote for politicians and celebrities, play trivia games and enter quiz shows, buy concert tickets, organise rallies and turn out the opposition, alert travellers to transportation delays, warn groups of people of weather and other emergency situations, advertise products and services, lend money and let you know if your bank account is overdrawn.

“It is a cultural phenomenon,” said Mike Short, chairman of the Mobile Data Association in England, where the number of text messages sent each week just passed one billion, about 25 percent higher than a year earlier.

Short parks the total texts sent in a year at two trillion to three trillion.

However, communication experts are divided over the survival of the lowly text message. Various alternative phone messaging systems that demand more technology, like the chatty back-and-forth of instant messaging, the photo messages or e-mail messages transmitted via the Internet, are waiting to overtake the SMS (short message service).

The cost and complexity of the newer rivals have so far held them back. For any system to take off, it needs to work seamlessly across the networks of all of the scores of mobile carriers around the world, a time-consuming process of bilateral negotiations that delayed the boom in texting until years after its creation.

In December 1992, sending merely a ‘Merry Christmas’ message to a single phone was complex. For its time, when cellphones themselves were still a novelty, the text message sent to the Vodafone engineers “was quite a feat,” Short said.

Jarvis and the teams at the predecessor companies of Vodafone and Airwide Solutions, where Papworth works, intended their text experiments as an enhancement for pagers, the popular communications gadget of the day for executives.

Brennan Hayden, who was an engineer in the 1990s for an Irish wireless company, Aldiscon, which invested in text messaging, said few people in telecommunications believed then that it would take off as a communication medium of its own.

“They said people would never use it, they wouldn’t be bothered to type messages on a phone,” said Hayden, now with WirelessDeveloper Agency in Michigan.

“I always believed in it,” he said. “I believed it could actually be a force to change the world.”

In June 1993, Hayden sent the first commercial text message in Los Angeles. His SMS, meant to signify the birth of a new form of communications, was “burp”.

Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at Airwide, believes that the messaging types are “not mutually exclusive” and that people will use the kind that works for them. In western nations, for instance, texting is favoured by the young.

“The industry is still struggling to find new services that are anywhere near as popular and profitable,” said John Delaney, principal analyst at Ovum. “SMS is simple, ubiquitous, easy to use and cost-effective,” he added.

The most recent up-and-coming threat is messaging that uses the language and programming of the Internet.

Just as voice calls can be made from personal computers, texts can be sent from personal computers to mobile phones as well and Internet companies like Yahoo, along with college student start-ups, are introducing ways of undercutting the mobile carriers’ prices.

Cost, in fact, is still a sensitive area for the text message. While many people believe text messaging is free because it is packaged with their mobile subscription, individual messages outside of the monthly bundle cost around 10 to 15 euro cents each. With a wholesale price of a few pennies, that gives telecom carriers a sizable profit margin.

But calling the text message pure profit for the carrier, Short said, “would be an overstatement” and not take into account the investments and enhancements that companies make in the networks to carry the texts.

“Problems with undelivered SMS are very rarely raised these days,” Short said, compared to the late 1990s.

When Hayden sends a message from his BlackBerry today, he always chooses the SMS menu option over the e-mail one.

“It’s easier to type in a phone number than an e-mail address,” he said, adding, “and for the recipient, there’s less hassle to go through to see it.”

Papworth admits to finding text messaging quite useful from time to time. A year ago, he was pleased to be able to use group texting to announce the birth of his daughter to a dozen friends around the world at once with a single message, he said.

He was chagrined to hear, however, that when a friend told his daughter that he knew the man who sent the first SMS, the daughter replied, “He’s still alive?”