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Like many stories of this kind, the idea that this person "pioneered the basis" of these technologies seems massively overblown. What she and Antheil patented w
by HL33tibCe7 3y ago
Like many stories of this kind, the idea that this person "pioneered the basis" of these technologies seems massively overblown. What she and Antheil patented was a system that used frequency hopping to help guide torpedoes, using a piano roll to switch between the frequencies. They did not "invent" frequency hopping, which had been discussed in the literature for 30 years already.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoBut a piano-roll (presumably of type she discovered in music boxes) is quite ingenious solution for synchronised key sequences, for the technology of the time. Kinda similar analogical transfer going on for the Jacquard loom as early "program storage".
- shakow 3y agoI don't think OP says that her work was not smart or non-innovative, merely that presenting it as “pioneering frequency hoping” is over the top. E.g. Hoare did a lot of smart things with Rust bringing real-world impact, still you wouldn't write on his epitaph that he “pioneered programming languages”.
- localplume 3y agoexactly. every single one of these cases is an absolute stretch and diminishes the work of the people who actually developed it. its historical revisionism at best at worst its offensive to the person because it suggests they were so small minded that they didn't or couldn't actually develop the technology to a sufficient enough degree such that they are actually associated with it. these people are hidden not because they're women, but because they didn't really contribute anything at all to the field
- anonym29 3y ago[flagged]
- brookst 3y ago[flagged]
- zmgsabst 3y ago“Pinkwashing” is garden variety bigoted myth making. And it hurts both men and women — as bigotry tends to do.
- flangola7 3y ago[flagged]
- jwkpiano1 3y agoExcept this was an actual real accomplishment, whose out of patent idea was used later by the Navy: https://physicsworld.com/a/a-tale-of-two-lives/ https://physicsworld.com/a/a-tale-of-two-lives/. The application was indeed original, as evidenced by the receipt of a patent for it. You can argue with how the work is described here, but trying to claim it wasn’t a real accomplishment or is somehow comparable to someone adding a bunch of consts is absurd.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoIt was a real accomplishment, no doubt, but it's not an accomplishment of the order that the article claims.
- jwkpiano1 3y ago
- fortran77 3y agoAnd the spread spectrum as used in modern devices is not frequency hopping.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoCould you explain what it is, then, and how it differs from frequency hopping?
- fortran77 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Qbc_inIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Qbc_inIc
- w7b7s7 3y agoYes, this is one of my favorite articles discussing the early patents dealing with frequency hopping and spread spectrum. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...
- bnralt 3y agoLooking at the early Wikipedia pages is fairly telling. From the first day that her page is up, Hedy Lamarr had a large section devoted to this invention[1]. But her co-inventor's Wikipedia only made a brief mention of it for the first several years[2]. It seems clear that people were interested in exaggerating her contributions in particular. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid=750266 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&oldid=95688450 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&ol...