Austrian actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr died #OTD in 2000.
Most of her inventions were not widely used, but in the 1940s she wanted to create something that would help Allied forces fight the Nazis as part of the II WW. She worked with composer George Antheil to develop a new way to steer torpedoes. She had already discovered that radio-signals used to control torpedoes could be jammed by the Nazis, making them miss their targets, & wanted to come up with an unjammable alternative.
The pair settled on a system that would randomly switch to different radio frequencies to get around jamming, known as frequency-hopping (FH) spread spectrum communication. It was controlled by a piano player mechanism of Antheil’s, meaning the system could switch between one of 88 different frequencies for each of the 88 black and white keys on a piano.
It is often said that this patent means Lamarr helped to invent Wi-Fi, but the story is more complicated than that. Lamarr and Antheil patented their invention in 1942, but it was classified until 1981, and during that time only used in military technology such as sonar or satellite communications. via @newscientist
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