PARIS — "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 his 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 - and then just a short while more before teenagers discovered them.