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Notes -
The truth:
Frequency-hopping was an old idea by the 1940s stretching back even into the late 1890s, described by Tesla (including in regards to torpedo guidance) at a minimum among others, with a patent from 1929 (over 10 years before Hedy's) even containing the idea (and proposed for essentially the exact same reason of protecting the secrecy/security of wireless communications).
The idea might have been independently reconceived of (of course that's what everyone claims, but the idea is actually a simple enough concept fundamentally (making it even more ridiculous to declare it some grand achievement) that it might be true) in regards to applying it to enhancing the stealth of radio-based torpedo guidance communications during WW2 (which ended up being mostly irrelevant as the whole idea of radio-based torpedo guidance at all was fairly primordial at the time and thus whatever technology developed wasn't likely to be compatible with what might be adopted in the future, that is it was a solution for a mostly hypothetical problem) during a conversation between Hedy and George Antheil, with many tellings being intentionally vague at best in regards to who actually brought it up first (and obviously the side saying Hedy has a particularly fervent and well-known bias and a record of playing fast and loose with history, to say the least, if it means promoting "representation").
Even in the pro-Hedy telling, Antheil came up with all of the details for the exact mechanism of control (based on a piano, as Antheil was a pianist) beyond the initial suggestion.
Hedy then hired Caltech professor Samuel Mackeown to take Antheil's still idea guy-tier description of the technology and turn it into an actual working prototype (which was found to be far too bulky, even if it weren't otherwise pointless, to be used in any practical military context as it would vastly weigh down the ships and torpedoes too much).
Even at that it's suspected by many that the whole story above is still fake entirely and that Hedy's final patent (or even just the basic idea) was simply "acquired" from her ex-husband and armaments (like torpedoes? Hmmm...) dealer Friedrich Mandl. (Mandl was an ardent fascist... but unfortunately for him an ardent Austrofascist, putting him in a somewhat awkward position in both the Axis and Allied sides of the world post-Anschluss. (He tried to collaborate with the Nazis anyway but Göring didn't like him and he was a Jew so he ended up having much of his property expropriated and running off to Switzerland.) Having Hedy publish the patent instead could have benefited both of them.)
Their exact implementation was not used at all during WW2. Eventually the category of techniques frequency-hopping is in was applied to most telecommunications, but since your router or GPS device is obviously not a radio-controlled torpedo trying to avoid sabotage, the exact motivations are obviously entirely different and the exact details vastly more sophisticated in design and implementation (but closer to the designs of engineers prior and subsequent to Mackeown like Broertjes who imagined frequency hopping being applied to pure communications).
So even in the most pro-Hedy telling (in which she still didn't come up with the exact implementation), at best you can maybe give her credit for not knowing about an idea that had been around for decades prior and possibly thinking of it herself (if she really was the one who brought it up first) and applying it to torpedoes (though she still wasn't the first in that either). Obviously though you tend to not get credit for adding something to the technological canon if you're decades late to the conception of it and thus it's pretty ridiculous to credit Hedy with basically any real novel contribution to modern Wi-Fi, GPS, etc. (My criticism isn't solely sex-based either; I don't give Antheil much credit other than being somewhat more engineered-minded than you average pianist. He didn't come up with the idea either even if he independently thought of it.)
You see similar sorts of chicanery with basically every category of invention that was essentially inevitable based on prior technological developments but took time to popularize/commercialize/standardize (traffic signals, light bulbs, etc.): Find the figure most beneficial to woke ideology who dabbled in it in the early days, give them all the credit, and ignore the rest. It's not like the audience you're seeking is going to challenge you on it, as they've been programmed to believe that such a thing is inherently immoral.
Anyway, sorry for the delay. I was rechecking all of the details (which seem to check out) to make sure I didn't end up as one of those Reddit "Akshually" guys who gets the facts just as wrong as what they're "correcting".
It's commendable you put in so much effort in this reply. Well done.
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.
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