South East England gave the world its first text message and much more
On 3 December 1992 an engineer from Reading sent a message from his computer to a Vodafone director's handset, the first text message ever. It is one of a remarkable string of firsts from England's most populous region, which also claims the first passenger railway and packet switching, the idea behind the internet.
Officially the region covers nine counties, from Kent and Sussex to Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, with about 9.6 million people in 2024; London counts as a separate region. In medieval times much of it belonged to Wessex, and Winchester served as England's capital after unification, though its influence faded as London came to dominate commerce. Today it has the largest economy of any UK region outside London, plus Gatwick Airport, and the New Forest and South Downs are both national parks.
Communications firsts cluster here. Donald Davies devised packet switching at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington in the late 1960s, and Americans adopted it for ARPANET. Bletchley Park's Colossus, arguably the first computer, started breaking Lorenz codes on 5 February 1944. The first submarine telephone cable to France was laid in 1891, and a cable from Kent in 1986 was the first undersea optical fibre link.
Transport records too. The Canterbury and Whitstable Railway began the world's first passenger service on 3 May 1830 and introduced the first railway season ticket in 1834. Eastbourne ran the first bus service in 1903, and the first aircraft flight in Britain took off from Farnborough in 1908. ThrustSSC, the world's fastest car in 1997, was built in West Sussex.
Science has deep roots as well. John Wallis introduced the infinity symbol in 1656, and Thomas Bayes of Tunbridge Wells gave his name to a theorem now used in spam filters. John Herschel coined the word photography in 1839, carbon fibre was invented at Farnborough in 1963, and methicillin, the first semi-synthetic penicillin, was discovered at Brockham Park in 1959. And no English-speaking university is older than Oxford.
Source: South East England
