Recognize the mother of Wifi

Our mother who art in WiFi
Thy beacon come
Thou handshake be done
In ac as in 802.11

From the wiki page

During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband arms dealer Fritz Mandl, "possibly to improve his chances of making a sale".[41] From the meetings, she learned that navies needed "a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water." Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course.[42] When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil's previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in the avant-garde piece written as a score for the film Ballet Mechanique that involved multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil's idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.[4][41]

This post is inaccurate. Neither WiFi nor GPS use FHSS, nor is Lamarr anything close to singularly credited with FHSS' invention (the earliest patent is credited to Nikola Tesla). This also implies that the Allies used her parent - they did not.

Also Richard Easton is the son of the man who invented GPS and had every right to be skeptical of this claim, and it looks like Internet dipshts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.

This is mostly wrong: while she did invent what would later be called Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), it isn't used in modern WiFi or in GPS. It is used in Bluetooth though.

I should point out that techniques like FHSS are only a part of what makes up a radio communication method. You can't say it was "the basis of Bluetooth" just because FHSS is one of the many technologies used in Bluetooth. She certainly contributed though.

Note that this frequency hopping is no longer used in most WiFi networks today. It is, however, critical to classic Bluetooth, and BLE still somewhat uses it. I have no idea how it's related to GPS.

It goes to show that being a good actress doesn't mean that you can't also be good at tech, even if you don't like to to brag about it.

Calling Hedy Lamarr "the Mother of Wifi" because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, "the Father of the iPhone".

Great to recognise this invention.

I was surprised by the choice of 'Mother of Wi-Fi' though - Wi-Fi hasn't used 'frequency hopping' as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.

GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I'm not an expert.

However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so 'Mother of Bluetooth' might have been more appropriate.

The headcrab Kleiner keeps as a pet in HL2 was named after her!

Woman make thing!? Me no likely! Woke lie!

Fucking troglodytes.

It’s a brief five-minute Google search for me, but it seems that everyone has problems with both reading comprehension and/or causality evaluation.

I think it’s great that such a patent exists and that the technology was invented by her. Yet, even checking the frequency-hopping spread spectrum page on Wikipedia shows that it was only one invention in the long series of discoveries and technologies, which was neither the first, nor the most crucial of them, and this particular option seems to be one of the sources of inspiration for later technologies (along with a bunch of predecessors).

The rest of the criticisms regarding the choice of Wi-Fi over Bluetooth is already mentioned in the comments of others.

I really don’t want to minimise the contribution of an individual towards the development of sophisticated technologies, and I have zero qualms about this individual being a woman, I just think that the presentation oversells the achievement which might cause additional mockery from those who do think that women (and actresses at that!) have no business in anything serious.

What I actually find impressive, however, is that a woman, at the time where women’s rights were far from what they are today (just read about her first marriage, that must have been hard), could be both an actress, an inventor, a producer, all while leading quite a bitter life it seems. Not many can boast that.

I guess where I’m going with that is that she, as many others, may be best praised as an example of a complex person that had many achievements as well as many hardships. Using her as a basis of “Didn’t think an actress could do something worthwhile? Gotcha!” statement seems a bit shallow.

edit: However, since this post showed me that a person like Hedy Lamarr has existed in the first place (yeah, I’m not well-versed in mid-20 century American culture, sorry), and interested me (and likely a bunch of others) enough to Google her biography, I’d say it’s a net positive regardless.

Okay, well, I'm a network professional with a specialty in wireless and a keen interest in historical wireless networking, and "non-standard" stuff is also quite interesting. I'm no Richard Easton.

I want to start with a disclaimer, by no means would I, nor should I be interpreted to be saying or implying that any contribution, regardless of source, isn't valuable. Whether it comes from a woman, or man, white, black, or any color in-between, non-binary, gay, bi, trans, whatever. The contributor is valuable and their contribution is always valued.

That being said, FHSS, has its uses, and it's been used in wireless. It's a valid technology that should be recognised as such. As with many things, it wasn't a singular effort, and nobody should imply otherwise.

As others have pointed out, the most commonly known technology which employs FHSS is Bluetooth; and trust me, trying to track down issues caused by BT interference is a nightmare because of it. Generally I avoid the problem by not using the 2.4ghz ISM band as much as possible, but I digress.

For those saying it's not part of 802.11, it actually is. It's an old part of the protocol which has long since been replaced and it is considered obsolete by the IEEE 802.11 group.

However, in the 802.11 protocol, sometimes called 802.11 prime (Wikipedia calls it "legacy"), it states: "[802.11] specified two raw data rates of 1 and 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or by either frequency hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) in the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11_(legacy_mode)

All I want to really add, is that networking is a team sport. If companies and people didn't work together to make it function, then it wouldn't work.

Only by collaborating and working together towards improvement and an increase in the ability of the technology to work across all platforms, vendors, manufacturers, and devices, can we get it to function at all. This fact is as true now as it was when FHSS was invented. Everyone needs to work together in order to make any real progress. Otherwise, all of our wifi stuff would "speak" different languages, and nothing outside of a single companies product line, would work with anything else.

Everyone's contributions have helped wifi get to it's current state, and that should never be forgotten.

Maybe an ancestor of wifi, but CSIRO invented wifi. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/wireless-lan

There is a great documentary about her on Netflix. It covers her love of science and her attempts to get her design to the military for the war effort.

From my research it is not the basis of WiFi though, it was specifically for encrypting communications to torpedos.

That's "Hedley."

Wifi doesn't use frequency hopping. That's bluetooth.

Blue check…

She took on where Heinrich Hertz left off, and made it to the top of the Tinseltown heap!
C'mon... you know you wanna see a musical on the life of Heinrich Hertz.

Considering the man spent over a year working in a blacked-out room, trying to detect the faint spark of electricity transmitted wirelessly, it's gonna have a song or three about fumbling or stumbling in the dark.

This is 1874! You'll be able to sue HER!

That's an incredibly sensationalistic way to put it. By that logic, the ancient greeks are the forefathers of WiFi, because they figured how to create static electricity using cotton and ambar.

You can (and should) give credit without overstating their achievement.