The submitted title ("An Austrian-American actress/inventor pioneered basis for WiFi, GPS, & Bluetooth") was highly editorialized, which breaks the HN guideline: "<i>Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.</i>" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>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: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>1. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633932" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633...</a>
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.
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.
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.