Imagine a Hollywood stunner who revolutionized the world of communications with her groundbreaking invention – a technology that paved the way for today’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Surprisingly, Wi-Fi technology is not as recent as commonly believed and can be traced back to World War II.
Even more astonishing is the fact that the inventor was none other than a top Hollywood beauty. Her name – Hedy Lamarr, the iconic heroine of the epic Biblical movie “Samson and Delilah” (1949), directed by the renowned Cecil B. DeMille. She shattered the stereotype that beauty and intelligence couldn’t coexist.
Lamarr, born into a Jewish family in Austria, fled the country when it was annexed by Nazi Germany. She discovered that Allied torpedoes were susceptible to Nazi attacks, as their radio signals could be jammed, rendering them useless.
Collaborating with composer George Antheil, she sought a solution to make the torpedoes impervious to enemy jamming. Together, they devised a system called frequency-hopping (FH) spread spectrum communication. This system randomly switched between different radio frequencies, effectively evading jamming. It could seamlessly shift between any of the 88 frequencies, each corresponding to a black or white key on a piano.
In 1942, Hedy Lamarr obtained a patent for her invention under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey. Although her innovation laid the foundation for today’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless communication technologies, it wasn’t utilized by the United States until the 1960s.
– Sourced from ‘Techtonic Shift: A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUTING AND THE WEB’ by Sohini Bagchi.
Pearls of Thoughts 