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Reminds me of something I noticed in the discussion about Hedy Lamarr. It's not uncommon to hear people say, "If she was a man, you'd hear about her being a gre
by bnralt 5y ago
Reminds me of something I noticed in the discussion about Hedy Lamarr. It's not uncommon to hear people say, "If she was a man, you'd hear about her being a great inventor." But her co-inventor, George Antheil, gets talked about much less , and often only in conjunction with her (search for discussions about either of them on Reddit, Hacker News or the like to see examples of this).
- Kalium 5y agoSometimes I see absurd claims being passed around, such as that Hedy Lamarr invented wifi. It is, perhaps, possible to go to far in rectifying the injustices of history.
- InitialLastName 5y agoI don't take too much offense at that one; frequency hopping is a hard enough thing to explain to a lay-person, but it is an enabling technology for wifi. It's like saying Albert Einstein invented the atom bomb... wrong, but not an absurd misunderstanding.
- Kalium 5y agoI get it as an innocent misunderstanding. Certainly the role of enabling technologies is often underplayed in lay understanding of technological advancements. I'm a bit more skeptical when it's a deliberate misrepresentation. You can claim with equal credibility that Guglielmo Marconi invented wifi.
- InitialLastName 5y agoI guess the moral of the story is that most modern technologies don't lend themselves well to the popular narrative of a solo inventor, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize the contributions of people who had the good ideas that made them possible. None of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon or William Shockley really invented the modern computer, but they all helped quite a bit.
- Kalium 5y agoI think you've put your finger on the most reasonable point to take away. The notion of a sole inventor is rarely congruent with how modern invention works.