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KNOWLEDGE CENTER MOBILE & WIRELESS
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth trace their roots back to Hollywood starlet Hedy Lamarr.
THE UNLIKELY birthplace of modern mobile and wireless technology was a Hollywood dinner party in 1940, in a conversation between actress Hedy Lamarr dubbed "the most beautiful girl in the world" - and film composer George Antheil. The topic? How to build a radio-controlled torpedo that couldn't be jammed by the Nazis.
Lamarr's first husband was a munitions maker, and she knew torpedoes. Her idea was to change frequencies rapidly to keep the radio signals to the torpedo from being jammed. Antheil's first major composition, Ballet Mechanique, used synchronized player pianos, and he suggested using paper rolls with holes punched in them to implement Lamarr's frequency-hopping idea
In 1942, Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for the invention of spreadspectrum radio, which would eventually become the basis for wireless networking and many digital cellular telephone systems. But details of the invention were kept secret, even though the US. Navy decided not to use it. After all, there was a war going on.
World War II spurred another key element of mobile communications when, in 1940, the company that would later become Motorola Inc. developed...