December 3 - this day in history

1879 – In his laboratory in Menlo Park, Thomas Edison and assistant Francis Upton demonstrated to the public the work of an incandescent lamp, which they developed over the year thanks to the support of financiers Morgan and Vanderbilt. A lamp with a carbon filament placed in a vacuum glass flask could burn continuously for four hours.

1910 – A neon lamp invented by the French physicist Georges Claude was first demonstrated at the Paris Auto Show.

1944 – In Athens, there were bloody clashes between demonstrators and pro-communist armed formations with the police, which grew into a confrontation in the whole country with the coalition Greek government supported by the British army. The civil war continued until February of the following year and ended with the disarmament of the pro-communist Liberation Army of Greece and the restoration of the monarchy.

1952 – 11 high-ranking functionaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, including its former general secretary, Deputy Prime Minister Rudolf Slansky, were hanged in Prague for accusations of collaboration with Western intelligence and Zionism. In 1963 he was rehabilitated, and in 1968 he was posthumously reinstated in the ranks of the Communist Party.
1961 – Anri Matisse's "Boat", hanging upside down for 46 days, was duly worn at the New York Museum of Contemporary Art

1984 – At the Chemical Combine in the Indian city of Bhopal, one of the largest industrial disasters arose in history: due to a valve fault at the local chemical plant for the production of pesticides, about 30 tons of highly toxic gas were thrown into the atmosphere, which resulted in the immediate death of 2 thousand people and injuries of 600 thousand ; 20 thousand of them lost their sights, and another 6 thousand died within a year from the day of the accident.

1992 – In Britain, the test engineer, Neil Papworth of Sema (now Mavenir Systems), sent the world's first SMS-message to Vodafone CEO Richard Jarvis. The first commercial short message service network was launched next year in Finland.