Hedy Lamarr (2018)

[dang]

The submitted title ("An Austrian-American actress/inventor pioneered basis for WiFi, GPS, & Bluetooth") was highly editorialized, which breaks the HN guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Submitters: please don't do that. It skews discussion in unhelpful ways—and particularly did so in this case. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[pomian]

Hedy's Folly, by Richard Rhodes. It's a very good book about Hedy Lamar's life and her fame, and work on that patent. It's interesting that the book is not mentioned. The author is the same one that wrote the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I believe the movie Oppenheimer, was based on. All of his books are very interesting, revealing many of the intricacies, that took place in recent history, making the world we live in today.

[c0pium]

Oppenheimer was based on “American Prometheus”, thus all the Prometheus references.

[nonrandomstring]

Frequency hopping is no small idea to crack because you either need a shared codebook (PRNG) or a means of re-keying to an ephemeral window of future sequences. Didn't read Lamarr's patent but she seems a natural hacker girl taking music boxes apart aged 5.

[developer93]

Just a hacker huh? Is a female hacker different than a male one?

[YoshiRulz]

TIL Kleiner's pet headcrab in HL2 is named after an inventor. I don't much care for the "great man" (great woman in this case) view of history, but this is a good story.

[peoplefromibiza]

She surely was a brilliant mind, but calling her "the mother of Wi-Fi" is IMO a bit disingenuous, it is like calling Becquerel "the father of the nuclear reactor" because he accidentally discovered spontaneous radioactivity.

[peoplefromibiza]

Also, @dang, it's fascinating that a streak of downvotes on a recent comment percolated on these two comments with the same exact magnitude and at the same time, on a thread that has no more traction.

how interesting...

especially this one, I see no reason why it went from +2 to 0 at the same time that the parent went from +7 to +5 since it doesn't say anything controversial or offensive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636480

It would be great if people could se who downvoted them

[peoplefromibiza]

cannot edit anymore, but after reading dang's comment, I wish to emphatise that "mother of the Wi-Fi" is a reference to the article content and not the title.

Specifically

Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

[Brajeshwar]

Even though I had stumbled/read about Hedy Lamarr earlier, the book "How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World"[1] by Steven Johnson was the one that got me to read it in detail. The book is exciting and would definitely be one of my casual reading suggestions.

1. https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633...

[tgv]

Weird choices. Clean water is not really on par with the phonograph.

[gsich]

Wlan is not using frequency hopping or am I mistaken?

[epcoa]

It was, briefly. Long before Wi-Fi was a household name when 802.11 (no b) was just standardized for industrial use there was an FHSS PHY. I think Proxim or one of the other defunct industrial data capture companies sold it into the 2000s.

In any case there’s a lot of overlapping commonality in the information theory and engineering of frequency hopping and more modern SS.

[evgen]

No, but an early wireless midpoint between nascent wifi deployments and really shitty WAP in a world before data over cellular networks was Ricochet Networks. Frequency hopping over the public bands of the era (900MHz mostly I think) it was able to give decent wireless internet in the mid 90s to those of us living in supported areas of Silicon Valley. When laptops were a new thing and public wifi still years away it was fun ‘work remote’ in some corner of a coffeeshop when everyone else was chained to office desktops.

[_joel]

Yes, otherwise interference would be a right pain (or render it unusable completely). This happens for many wireless systems (like bluetooth too).

[BenjiWiebe]

Bluetooth uses frequency hopping. WiFi and GPS do not.

[motohagiography]

The story of Hedy Lamar was an amazing piece of hacker lore to discover before the web when culture was mostly confined to paper and scarce. I often think makers form a parallel culture with its own thread of history. Hacker history like this shows that breakthrough technology is the effect of individual minds and desire.

[HL33tibCe7]

Like many stories of this kind, the idea that this person "pioneered the basis" of these technologies seems massively overblown. What she and Antheil patented was a system that used frequency hopping to help guide torpedoes, using a piano roll to switch between the frequencies. They did not "invent" frequency hopping, which had been discussed in the literature for 30 years already.

[nonrandomstring]

But a piano-roll (presumably of type she discovered in music boxes) is quite ingenious solution for synchronised key sequences, for the technology of the time. Kinda similar analogical transfer going on for the Jacquard loom as early "program storage".

[w7b7s7]

Yes, this is one of my favorite articles discussing the early patents dealing with frequency hopping and spread spectrum.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...

[fortran77]

And the spread spectrum as used in modern devices is not frequency hopping.

[localplume]

exactly. every single one of these cases is an absolute stretch and diminishes the work of the people who actually developed it. its historical revisionism at best

at worst its offensive to the person because it suggests they were so small minded that they didn't or couldn't actually develop the technology to a sufficient enough degree such that they are actually associated with it. these people are hidden not because they're women, but because they didn't really contribute anything at all to the field

[bnralt]

Looking at the early Wikipedia pages is fairly telling. From the first day that her page is up, Hedy Lamarr had a large section devoted to this invention[1]. But her co-inventor's Wikipedia only made a brief mention of it for the first several years[2]. It seems clear that people were interested in exaggerating her contributions in particular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&ol...

[mellosouls]

Note that this "Austrian-American actress" (I understand the helpful wording is aimed at non-buffs who may not recognise the name Hedy Lamarr) was a huge star in her day, an equivalent to - say - Margot Robbie.

[shellac]

Got her own joke name in Blazing Saddles. No greater honour.

[CapitalistCartr]

Wow, I'm old. I know who Hedy is, had to look up Margot Robbie.

[rurban]

Bigger than Robbie, much bigger

[djoletina]

Serious question, how is she “-American”, she lived and worked in the States in the later part of her life, but her roots aren’t American?

[hackyhacky]

She became a US citizen in 1953. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

[kvandy]

Harrumph!