Today in History: December 3

On this day in history, December 3:

1910: French "Thomas Edison," Georges Claude, demonstrates the modern neon light at the Paris Auto Show. Claude designed and developed neon lights as a way to find an economically profitable use for his Air Liquefaction Company's neon lights, which eventually became a by-product of the liquefaction process. A significant difference between Claude's neon tube lighting and other similar lighting of the time was that his system included a method of purifying the gases within the sealed glass tube and a method of significantly reducing the rate of photodegradation. Among Claude's many other inventions, he developed a power generation system that used wind turbines to pump water into the deep sea (using the temperature difference between surface water and deep water to generate electricity); and developed a system for transporting acetylene A method to greatly reduce the explosiveness of the process (transporting acetylene was a tricky and dangerous job at the time); designed the Claude Air Liquide system, making liquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon commercially viable for the first time in industry (he also developed Liquid chlorine used by French troops to attack enemy forces during World War I); developed a method for synthesizing ammonia; significantly improved existing methods of using liquid oxygen to generate electricity; pioneered the use of liquid oxygen in iron smelting.

Unfortunately, his life ended less productively than it began, in part because of his bizarre decision to support the Axis powers after Germany invaded France. Not only that, he openly supported Using extreme force to suppress the French resistance, which is basically the essence of "I welcome our neo-Nazi overlords for one," he was revoked as a member of the French Academy of Sciences and sentenced to life in prison. He only served about five years in prison, though before some more influential people he knew managed to get him released.

1967: In Cape Town, South Africa, Christiaan Barnard becomes a superstar among doctors when he performs the first successful human-to-human heart transplant. The operation took 9 hours and 30 people to complete. Unfortunately, the transplant recipient, Louis Washkansky, suffered from an incurable and quickly fatal heart disease that Barnard and his colleagues misunderstood five days after the surgery. There were some signs that the heart was being rejected; so they heavily used immunosuppressants, and 18 days after surgery, Washkansky's immune system weakened significantly, causing him to die of pneumonia. The person placed in Washkansky's heart came from Denise Darvall, who had been brain-dead in a car accident the day before. Her father then allowed Barnard to stop her heartbeat and place it in Washkansky.

1992: The first text message is sent by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer working for Sema Group. The text message read "Merry Christmas". Approximately 8 trillion text messages were sent in 2011, and the number in 2012 will exceed this number. The 2011 figure was equivalent to approximately 1,100 text messages per year per person on Earth.

Today, text messages are typically sent using Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) when containing multimedia-like images or videos. The SMS message itself typically contains 140-190 bytes of data each (depending on the provider's implementation). This means that the average cost per text (not available on some plans) is 20 cents per text which equates to around $1300 per megabyte of data transferred.

To put that into perspective, the average one-minute phone call uses about the same amount of data as 600 text messages ($120, no plan). So while the cost of texting is exorbitant, sending text messages actually saves cell phone providers a lot of the infrastructure costs of the data required to make calls over the phone,

Further illustrating the absurdity of the cost of texting, data plans It can be purchased from most providers for no more than $50 per month for gigabyte transfers. By comparison, transmitting 3 GB (322225472 bytes) of data via SMS would cost around $4 million and 0.20 cents per text.

Even on one plan, 1,000 texts costs $20, which is a cost of 2 cents per text, so at this speed, a 3GB data transfer is about $400,000.

Given that the top mobile phone providers have a virtual monopoly that allows them to set text messaging prices however they want, and there's nothing people can do about it, this is unlikely to change anytime soon. In fact, the cost per text message has been rising steadily for four years in a row, as these companies continue to try to milk text messages for every penny they can get