What’s your evidence, Richard Easton??!?
Our mother who art in WiFi
Thy beacon come
Thou handshake be done
In ac as in 802.11ACK
Let me tempt you with some SYN
No thanks, I’m FIN.
SYN-ACK
I don’t know who this guy is. Did he do something to Lamarr?
He’s the guy in the comment asking for evidence. Which I don’t think is wrong, but it seems like he could’ve done some research and they could’ve posted a link for anyone who wanted to know more
plus he literally tried to snotnose the official twitter of the US Cyber Command posting something that is deeply within their field in their offical capacity for women’s history month. It does rather present him as acting in bad faith
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 dipsh*ts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.
Wikipedia link for Easton (and Parkinson) credit for GPS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#:~:text=Bradford Parkinson%2C professor of aeronautics,with the rank of colonel.
Ee times article referencing FHSS and Nikola Tesla:
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.
Don’t try and oversell “famous woman does tech thing”. Try and and make people aware of the women who actually did really cool tech things. Marie Curie was a bad ass
I can 100% agree with that. Sadly She often gets forgotten.
Wait til he finds out that the first computer programs were written by some poet with daddy issues
Wifi doesn’t use frequency hopping. That’s bluetooth.
https://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents/DocumentArchives/1996_docs/1196049D_scan.pdf
Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum PHY of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard
Edit: h3ndrik@feddit.de is correct. FHSS was quickly dropped for DSSS and OFDM, and FHSS is not used in any modern WiFi specs. You can see the list in table 7.6 here https://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1329709&seqNum=4
It may be dropped, but it was used in the beginning
Wouldn’t that not still make her the mother of Wifi?
Hehehe, you can call her the mother of early 802.11 and Bluetooth.
that’s not how it works. edit: others pointed it out already it seems. you would still call the inventor of a first car the father lf cars even though it has nothing to do with modern cars
edit2: but considering that she didn’t really invent wifi, just frequency hopping, I would maybe call her grandmother or something
Yeah, I think I get it. I mean the analogy is a bit flawed. What she invented is that alike synchronizing the rolls of player pianos, you could build a mechanism that hops frequencies (instead of piano keys) to make remote controlling torpedos resilient against jamming.
Idk. To me it feels like calling the inventor of three-wheeled vehicles the father/mother of cars, if we want to stay with that analogy. It’s remotely related, not an integral part and nowadays solved differently. But the first car was a tricycle. (Benz Patent-Motorwagen)
But I don’t want to invalidate her achievements either… It’s one (important) contribution to technology. And it’s not always that one single person invents the whole concept of a radio. Or a car. And get’s to be the whole parent of it. Things build upon each other. Sometimes it needs a lot of contributions of several individuals to make something possible… Nowadays more so than in the old times.
But that’s not part of 802.11n or 802.11g or “a” or what we call “Wifi”… 802.11 in itself is a pretty long standard, including all kinds of different things.
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]
Gotcha, WiFi is a bunch of tiny pianists in a box
That’s why memes are hard to understand- I’m tone deaf.