Scott Weingart

The surprisingly complex journey a text message takes every time we hit 'send.'

Engineers would say that, when the phone senses voltage fluctuations over the ‘send’ button, it sends the encoded message to the SIM card (that tiny card your cell provider puts in your phone so it knows what your phone number is), and in the process it wraps it in all sorts of useful contextual data. By the time it reaches my wife’s SIM, it goes from a 140-byte message (just the text) to a 176-byte message (text + context).