Friedhelm Hillebrand [SEP] occupation
Friedhelm Hillebrand
Friedhelm Hillebrand is a German engineer who has been influential in setting mobile telecommunications standards. As chairman of the non-voice services committee for the Global System for Mobile Communications standard in 1985, he conducted experiments to determine the length needed for text messages and found that 160 characters was sufficient. This subsequently became the basis for the 140 character limit now used by Twitter. 
He was born in Warstein in 1940, and as a child, was active in amateur radio. He gained a master's degree in
. The result was approved by the main GSM group in a June '85 document which was distributed to industry. The input documents on SMS had been prepared by Friedhelm Hillebrand (Deutsche Telekom) with contributions from Bernard Ghillebaert (France Télécom). The definition that Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert brought into GSM called for the provision of a message transmission service of alphanumeric messages to mobile users "with acknowledgement capabilities". The last three words transformed SMS into something much more useful than the prevailing messaging paging that some in GSM might