Communicating over distance has been one of humanity’s most longstanding challenges.
The solutions were often imprecise, and left room for reader error, and on top of that, most delivery methods limited the size a message could be.
Smoke signals, reflective plate signals, just having people carry the message, et cetera are all valid ways to get the message to where it’s going – but what would we call a spiritual predecessor to SMS messaging?
The Pigeon
Pigeon messages work in a way that’s a little unintuitive. Birds have excellent navigational skills, and can return home from basically anywhere within their range as long as they can orient themselves. Exactly how they do that is still not fully explained, but it seems to be a mix of using the Earth’s magnetic field, the sun, and other features to get back to their nest or coop.
Homing pigeons don’t fly back and forth – a pigeon is taken with someone on a trip and then released so they return home with a message. The same goes for rental doves at weddings or magic shows!
A pigeon actually received war honors for acting as a message carrier during World War 1 – despite being shot more than once, the pigeon Cher Ami successfully returned to his coop with the info he was entrusted with.
You notice something – Cher Ami nearly didn’t make it back. Pigeon-based message delivery has many problems that START with hawks and human hunters and keep going, but it was a relatively quick way to transport messages without people carrying the actual letter or information. You just had to be careful when you released the bird so that it didn’t get shot, grabbed, or try to hunker down for the night before it got to where it was going, and even then it’s not guaranteed to arrive.
Telegrams
The first telegrams revolutionized the way messages were sent long-distance. Couriers didn’t have to travel between places and risk getting shot or caught, pigeoneers didn’t have to worry about their birds not making it to their destination, the only holdup was having a telegram wire going to the spot the telegrams needed to go. This was nearly instant! Such a thing had only existed in incredibly limited capacities before! Putting up the lines connected towns to each other in a way they had NEVER been able to connect before.
Telegrams were not actually fully secure for many of the same reasons SMS messages are no longer fully secure. An interested party could tap a telegram line and then listen in as messages were transferred across it, which was especially relevant for stock trading or wartime. The process was a bit complicated and potentially dangerous (the lines are conducting electricity) but not so complicated or dangerous that an average person couldn’t do it if they really wanted to. Letters were still a more secure way of transferring mail for a long time because of this, and that was also subject to hacks like “looking at it over a bright light to see the words printed on the paper without opening it”. Couriers remained a more secure way of transferring information between places with less risk of interception by outsiders as long as they didn’t get caught or shot in the process.
The Pager
Between the big brick phones of yesteryear and the small, sleek smartphones of today were the pagers, a sort of intermediary step between old style telegrams and today’s SMS. Pagers can be one-way or two-way, and work by sending messages to ‘stations’ that then pass the message to its destination, much like SMS messages are sent to a network cell tower before being transmitted to their destination. They don’t have the power to broadcast to each other without an intermediary.
Pagers are actually more resistant to downtime than cell phones – because pager networks can overlap, and the stations can be powered more easily by themselves than, say, a cell tower, they are much more difficult to bring down. That said, they’re not immune to the message interception problem all of these have suffered so far: pager messages can be caught at the station and read that way. While pager messages can be encrypted, it’s still not recommended to transfer especially sensitive data across them.
SMS
SMS cloning or spoofing is a method by which a hacker contacts your phone carrier pretending to be you, asks that your SIM card be swapped to them, and then intercepts your text messages until you realize you’re not getting cell service. It’s a pretty serious act of identity theft and requires a lot of personal information to get it done – but if you’re the person who has access to all of your business’s accounts, and you have personal information floating around in the dark web ether, it’s not impossible to become a victim. This is one of the reasons Microsoft is recommending people swap off of SMS messaging for passkeys or authentication apps, which are more secure because they don’t rely on cell service.
SMS messages were an enormous step up after cellular calling became an option. It’s a shame spoofing them is getting easier – but they’ll never fully lose their utility as information transport even if they’re not really great for 2FA any more!
