Jewish Invention Myths: Frequency-hopping Spread Spectrum Technology
Sometimes ‘jewish invention’ claims are extremely garbled and you have to untangle them in order to make sense of them. This is the case with our next ‘jewish invention’ claim which regards frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.
‘MNews’ claims that:
‘Hedy Lamarr – Secret Communication System
A Hollywood star passionate about science invented a radio system for preventing jamming and allowed the world to use spread spectrum communication technology. It is due to this that today we can use mobile phones and Wi-Fi.’ (1)
To be clear the ‘Secret Communication System’ is actually the name of a US patent from 10th June 1941 that was granted on 11th August 1942 and using piano player rolls to switch between multiple frequencies preventing radio jamming. (2)
Also, Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler but the patent was registered under her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey) was not the inventor but rather the co-inventor with German American musician, composer and prominent anti-Nazi George Antheil of the ‘Secret Communication System’. (3)
Despite the patent being donated for free to the US Navy it was never actually used (4) because it was simply too big to actually fit on a torpedo and for that torpedo to then fit in a torpedo tube. (5)
Also, Lamarr and Antheil weren’t the first to come up with frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology with famous Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi creating the concept in 1899 to minimize radio interference (6)
Polish engineer Leonard Danilewicz came up with the same concept in 1929 as a means to engage in secret radio communication for the Polish military, (7) while Swiss inventor Gustav Guanella came up with the same concept attached to an early radar system (8) and in Germany Kurt Dannehl and Paul Kotowski – engineers at Telefunken - applied for and received a patent for a ‘device to hide voice signals under a broadband noiselike signal produced by a rotating generator’ in 1935. (9)
So, no Hedy Lamarr didn’t invent frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology but rather Guglielmo Marconi did.
Indeed, Lamarr and Antheil’s invention was never even used!
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://patents.google.com/patent/US2292387; David Kahn, 2014, ‘How I Discovered World War II’s Great Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code’, 1st Edition, CRC Press: Boca Raton, p. 158
(3) https://patents.google.com/patent/US2292387
(4) Ari Ben-Menahem, 2009, ‘Historical Encyclopaedia of Natural and Mathematical Sciences’, Vol, 1, Springer: New York, pp. 4527-4530 also https://www.npr.org/2011/11/27/142664182/most-beautiful-woman-by-day-inventor-by-night
(5) https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/hedy-lamarr-radio-controlled-torpedo
(6) Kahn, Op. Cit., p. 158
(7) Ibid.; Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, 1984, ‘Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two’, 1st Edition, University Publications of America: Lanham, p. 27
(8) Kahn, Op. Cit., p. 158
(9) Ibid.