While I missed this a day; we have to give our regards to a beautiful and smart women that gave us the foundation of why we have the wonderful world of wireless communications today.
It would have been her 100th birthday yesterday. As a side; she never received any $$ from this. (See attached patent). While working at Symbol in 1999-2001 I featured her in my presentations to www.aami.org. Note: Symbol, became Motorola Solutions, now most recently becoming Zebra was the company that commercialized Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum. (Think bar code scanners). They were the original guys (company) behind the Wi-Fi Alliance and started off the Wi-Fi revolution as we noted. In 2000 while working at Symbol I worked with Welch Allyn that was the "first company" that had incorporated spread spectrum for a patient monitor. This was actually frequency hopping spectrum spectrum before 802.11b (direct sequence), came got approved in 1999. Below is an excerpt copied from an announcement on Lamarr.
HEDY LAMARR, screen actress, was revealed today in a new role, that of an inventor," reported The New York Times on 1 October 1941. "So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details."
The invention was not her first. Lamarr previously experimented with cola-flavored bouillon cubes for homemade soft drinks. But her new idea, which officials would only say was "related to remote control of apparatus employed in warfare", would become a signal innovation of the century, the technology now underlying cellphones and Wi-Fi. Expertly explaining the genesis and consequences of Lamarr's invention, in Hedy's Folly, Richard Rhodes transforms a surprising historical anecdote into a fascinating story about the unpredictable development of novel technologies.
When Lamarr turned her attention to national defense, following the tragic sinking of a ship full of refugees by a German U-boat in 1940, she knew far more about armaments than most movie stars. Before arriving in Hollywood, she had been married to the Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, who supplied the Axis powers. Dining with Nazi generals, Lamarr not only learned about the latest submarines and missiles but also the problems with them: notably the challenge of guiding a torpedo by radio, and shielding the signal from enemy interference.
Her insight was that you could protect wireless communication from jamming by varying the frequency at which radio signals were transmitted: if the channel was switched unpredictably, the enemy wouldn't know which bands to block. But her ingenious "frequency-hopping" idea was just a hunch until Lamarr met fellow amateur inventor George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner.
Notorious in the music world for avant-garde compositions featuring airplane propellers and synchronized player pianos, prior to the war, Antheil had galvanized Paris, and incited riots, with his cacophonous Ballet Mécanique. He had also attempted to invent an open-top pianola with which to teach basic keyboard technique. It flopped, but this background came in handy. To realize Lamarr's idea, Antheil proposed coordinating transmitter and receiver by controlling the switching between channels with two identical piano rolls running at the same speed.
At least that was the analogy - and the analogy was what sunk their plan. When the US navy rejected their invention, Antheil remarked: "My God! I can see [them] saying, 'We can't put a player piano into a torpedo!'" The usefulness of their idea went unrecognized until the 1950s, and unimplemented until the 60s.
By then the operating premise, known as spread-spectrum, had applications far beyond torpedoes and frequency jamming. Information theory proved that a signal was made more robust - and could be transmitted more efficiently - if spread across multiple frequencies. The problems introduced by new technologies gave an old idea new salience. Today, for example, frequency hopping prevents cellphone conversations from crisscrossing.

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