Texting has become such a routine part of daily life that most of us don’t even think twice about it anymore. We fire off messages all day long to family, friends, coworkers, even total strangers on the internet. We share images and videos in seconds.
Sometimes all it takes is a single letter to get a point across. A well-placed “k” in response to a long paragraph is passive aggressive, sure. But it communicates plenty.
Rewind a few centuries, though, and people didn’t have that kind of luxury. Communication meant carefully putting pen to paper and scribbling out mistakes as you went.
You really had to think about what you wanted to say before committing it to a page. And once that letter was sealed and sent, it could take days or even weeks to reach the person on the other end.
The practice of letter writing actually goes back a long time. According to the BBC, the ancient historian Hellanicus credited Queen Atossa of Persia with inventing it around 500 BC, when she was about 50 years old.
Atossa was the eldest daughter of Cyrus the Great, who founded the first Persian empire. The archaeologist Sir John Linton Myres described her as “the power behind the throne.” What she wrote hasn’t survived, but the tradition she started clearly did.
With all the time and effort involved in writing and delivering each letter, there was a natural limit to how many one person could send. The gap between that era and today is huge.
According to a study by Pew Research Center, 18 to 24 year olds were already sending or receiving an average of 109.5 text messages per day in 2011. That works out to more than 3,200 a month.
For comparison, Charles Darwin’s entire archived correspondence contains around 15,000 letters written and received over his lifetime. A single college student texting at that 2011 rate could have matched his entire collection in under five months.
Of course, communication did eventually get faster. Samuel F.B. Morse changed the game with the telegraph, making it possible to send words electrically across long distances.
Messages no longer had to travel by horse or ship. It was a massive leap forward and set the stage for everything that followed.
Still, the kind of texting we know today took a while longer to come together. The concept of SMS, or Short Message Service, was conceived in 1984 by engineers Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert.
Hillebrand also established the 160-character limit after determining it was the ideal length for short, conversational exchanges.
