
Hedy Lamarr - boshomi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
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basch
Sometimes its hard to know what to believe. On the surface, this sounds like a
pretty plausible argument that her contributions leading to WiFi is almost
entirely a clickbait invention

[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/23755](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/23755)

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ghaff
There's a tendency to credit some singular person for an invention like TV,
the steam engine, etc. The reality is usually a lot messier in that there is
usually prior art, variations that didn't work as well, predecessors of
various sorts, etc. But we like having a nice simple trivia night answer.

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boshomi
Yes, it was an abstraction of a completely different use case into something
never thought before. [1]

[1] »Player Pianos, Sex Appeal, and Patent #2,292,387» ELIZA SCHMIDKUNZ
2006/09 (in Inside GNSS)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160827181419/http://www.inside...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160827181419/http://www.insidegnss.com/node/303)

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etaioinshrdlu
Fun trivia not mentioned on that page: in Half Life 2, the scientist's pet
headcrab Lamarr is named after Hedy Lamarr and is referred to as "Hedy" at one
point... "There's only one Hedy"

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RandomNick
That's Hedley!

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mark-r
Hah! I recognize that reference, too bad it's totally off topic.

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globular-toast
The gender doesn't seem relevant here, unless you think it's unusual for women
to invent things. It's quite interesting for someone to be both an actor and
an inventor in weapons research, though.

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rsj_hn
I think the gender really is key here, since Heddy's sole contribution was co-
authoring a single patent to use piano rolls to generate coded messages. I
guess you can call this "weapons research" in the sense that cryptography is
sometimes considered munitions. But it wasn't very good cryptography and
didn't end up being used, so I don't think anyone would care about this except
for Heddy being turned into a type of "women in science" icon, with people
then claiming that the piano roll was really spread spectrum, so Heddy
invented spread spectrum, and others claiming that the piano roll meant she
invented GPS, cell phones, etc. It's really out of control.

This is unfortunate as there are many accomplished women in science who are
real scientists and who made real contributions, but are not well known
because there is no Hollywood star angle to tie in, just actual science. For
example my favorite female researcher would have to be Karen Uhlenbeck, whom
no one in popular culture has heard of, but who was (IMO) the most brilliant
female mathematician of the last 100 hundred years. There are many such
examples of unknown women scientists if we look for real inventors and real
scientists, rather than looking for someone "sexy" to make into an icon for
our favorite causes.

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AnimalMuppet
It was using piano rolls to control frequency hopping, not as cryptography.
The intent was to make radio-controlled torpedoes more difficult to jam.
That's far more munitions than just "cryptography is munitions".

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rsj_hn
In modern parlance, it's not munitions at all. But yes, Antheil and Lamarr's
proposed device was trying to hide the signal so that it would be harder to
jam by hopping along one of 88 frequencies which were marked in the piano
roll.

This is a form of cryptography. Any algorithm meant to authenticate, sign, or
hide information is cryptography, and any attempt to break such techniques is
cryptanalysis. Currently we do not like to think of cryptography as munitions
due to the crypto wars of the 90s. But however you fall on that debate of
whether cryptography is munitions, it is misleading to consider someone
volunteering their time in an unprofessional capacity to send an unsolicited
patent to the Navy, which the Navy rejected, as being equal to working in
"munitions research"

