The fathers of SMS
The story of “who created SMS” is really fascinating. It offers insight into not just to who the hero’s were that made it happen, but how society (nearly a quarter of a Century later) sets about recognising the fathers of such an outstanding outcome.
If anyone went to their local public Library and asked for a book on the creation of SMS they are likely to come away with one published by Wiley in 2010 called “Short Message Service”. It contains the names of anybody of any importance in the creation of SMS. It is forensic in its detail. But how many people today do research using books in a library?
The Internet has become most peoples’ gateway to information. If anyone Googles on the Internet “Who invented SMS” then the great Google information engine offers too many names including: Matti Makkonen, Finn Trosby, Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert, Oculy Silaban, Neil Papworth…and that is only Page 1 of the Google search results (Feb 2013).
The problem with Google is that it lacks discrimination for the truth. Wilkipedia often does not help in complex and controversial areas. It tends to descend into an information mush. So the serious journalist is left sorting through contradictory Google search results. Many on short dead-lines pick the answer that seems to have the most independent citations.
This is what happened during the 20th Anniversary of SMS. Most came to the conclusion that a Matti Makkonen is the father of SMS…a name that does not appear anywhere in the highly reliable account in the Wiley book on SMS. This should be a warning for the future. All those wrong media articles giving an entirely erroneous account become yet more citations in Google…leading more into the trap of thinking…all these people saying the same thing cannot be wrong. Well they were wrong!
Myth of Matti Makkonen and his SMS invention
There is a story worthy of a minor Hollywood movie about the father of SMS and Matti Makkonen but it is not quite the story many might imagine.
My research could find absolutely no link between Matti Makkonen and the conception or development of SMS. Instead a comedy of errors emerges. What is nearer to the truth is a story that begins with a shy local Nokia manager being interviewed by a lady reporter for a local Finnish newspaper. During the interview he makes a throw away remark that, whilst having a pizza in a Copenhagen pizza parlour, he imagined the potential of sending text messages on mobile phones. But as far as I can tell the only person he ever communicated this idea to was the local journalist interviewing him. Certainly the Chairman of GSM at the time has no recollection or record of it. The journalist then embellishes the story that he was the “father of SMS”. He later claimed to have tried to correct this with the local newspaper. He told them he was not claiming to be the father of SMS. This is spun by the journalist into an even better story of “the modest hero” who was the father of SMS. This is put on-file and is then picked up by a national Finnish newspaper that runs the story. This gets it onto the radar of the Finnish Government who adds his name to a Finnish Foreign Office web site as one of the great Finns alongside the composer Sibelius.
One assumes by this time it became impossible for such a shy man to deny the story in blunt enough terms to allow the real truth to emerge – so he rides along with the journalist’s creativity but sticks to his line that he is not claiming to be “the father of SMS” – which is taken as confirmation of his “modest hero” status. Soon every journalist was picking up the story on Google searches and repeating the claim in various international articles which became self-reinforcing for the next round of those seeking who the father of SMS was. By now, such was the universal acclaim that Makkonen started to believe that he really had invented SMS. He was not the only one sucked into the myth that had now taken root on the Internet. An eminent judging panel awarded him the prestigious Economist Innovation Award in 1999 for his (non-existent) work on Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. His name is placed alongside such illustrious names as Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee, other winners of this award.
In 2005 a group of outraged GSM veterans had enough and headed for Helsinki to confront Mr Makkonen. He admitted to them that he had nothing to do with the creation of texting. What the veterans saw in front of them was a very nice man who found himself at the centre of a story that spun out of his control. Rather than publicly expose this deception the GSM veterans accepted Makkonen’s assurance that he would no longer claim to have created SMS and pass on all future inquiries about the origins of SMS to them. This gentlemen’s agreement did not last. Makkonen accepted an interview with the BBC on the 20th anniversary of SMS that put the myth firmly back on track and crushing the hopes of those who really had invented SMS that the world might recognise their inspiration (and perspiration) to have created the world’s largest messaging community.
If proof were needed that the myth of Makkonen’s invention of the SMS no longer needed any help from the man himself it came with his death in June 2015. There were a flood on media comment that the modest father of SMS had just died. The Tech section of BBC web site on 30th June led with the headline “Finish Pioneer of Texting Dies” with the following eulogy: “Matti Makkonen, who helped to launch the worldwide sensation of texting, has died at the age of 63 after an illness. Makkonen became known as the father of SMS after developing the idea of sending messages via mobile networks. Despite the nickname, he was often quick to point out that he did not invent the technology single-handedly“.
From “zero to hero” on the back of a pizza in Copenhagen is quite a remarkable achievement in its own right. How much of this is down to Makkonen himself and how much is down lazy journalism? I find it quite incredible that so many journalists (and others) accepted that he had not invented SMS single-handedly but none took the trouble to ask any of those “other hands” what role he’d actually played.
So who really did create SMS?
1. All 21st Century technology draws on a huge number of technical ideas – so it is a completely useless enterprise to try to track back from an outcome (like SMS) to a single person in the 15th Century thinking hill-top beacons could become a simple messaging system. The fact is that in the early 1980’s the world was awash with people having ideas about mobile messaging.
2. The point of origin of what we would recognise today as SMS was a document that emerged in the joint Franco-German R&D trials in October 1984 calling for the provision of a message transmission service of alphanumeric messages to mobile users with acknowledgement capabilities.
3. Here the story moves into GSM. A simple way to determine who the father of SMS was in GSM is to imagine he (or she) has never been born and ask if SMS (as we know it) would still have happened? On this test SMS has two fathers – Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. They were the guiding hands in SMS’s pivotal moment.
4. So GSM now had a service definition but this still had to be given technical substance. If we now list those most responsible for the shaping a very successful technical solution the three names that appear at the very top of our list would be Finn Trosby, Kevin Holley and Ian Harris.
We now have the two plus three most credible heroes of SMS – delivering both a brilliant concept and a viable technical solution respectively.
6.The next notable milestone is the first SMS sent over an operational GSM network. Here Neil Papworth steals the lime-light with his SMS to Richard Jarvis that Richard received on his Orbitel 901 in 1992. There have been other claims to have sent the first SMS but they miss the point. These sort of “firsts” are media events to mark a commercial milestone – in this case a Vodafone milestone. An illustration of this is the widely accepted story that the British TV Comedian Ernie Wise made the first cellular call over the UK cellular networks in 1985 but almost certainly there were test calls going over both cellular networks prior to their official public launch.
7. At this stage of the SMS story journalists tend to leap straight to the huge phenomenon of young people sending SMS messages to each other. The spin on the story is that those in GSM in 1984-88 missed the blindingly obvious and children had to show them the way. In fact there was a monumental shaping event that came in-between. It was the great mobile revolution transforming mobile from an expensive tool for the business community (and the wealthy) to a mass consumer item. The point of origin for this transformation is widely attributed to be the DTI Phones on the Move consultation document in 1988.
8. The final thread in the SMS success story occurs around 1995. A substantial number of GSM networks are, by then, providing inter-connection of SMS messaging and mobile “pre-paid” arrives (an innovation we attribute to the Portuguese GSM operator TMN).
9. Once the mobile became so cheap that even most children could afford one – then the condition for the mass take-off of SMS fell into place – the driving factor being an SMS message costing up to 10 times less than a telephone call. It is a credit to modern education that most children could work out how to get the most for their pocket money and master keyboard entry. This is what drove SMS messaging volumes into the stratosphere in the youth market.
The SMS Technical Achievements as viewed in 1991
It is easy to look back at SMS in the light of its enormous success as the world’s largest and most successful messaging community. But how was it viewed in 1991 at the point when GSM networks were only just being switched on. The following paper was presented by Kevin Holley to IEE Colloquium on GSM and PCN Enhanced Mobile Services in January 1991 and offers us this unique view of SMS – even before the first SMS message had been sent.