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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

The hyperbole that 'Hedy Lamarr invented Bluetooth' seems innocuous to me - it's a pop culture thing, like the claim that 'Steve Jobs invented the personal computer'.

I wouldn't lose sleep over hypothetical crestfallen child engineers. If they read a biography of Hedy Lamarr, they'll finish it more impressed, not less. She was an exceptional person.

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That sounds like "Cocaine seems innocuous to me—it's a party drug, like strychnine."

It's hard to imagine a historical myth about personal computing more harmful than the myth that it was invented by a man who spent his life trying to take the power of personal computing away from the people!

Afaik the basis of the Bluetooth thing is that out of all the different kinds of spread-spectrum radio we use now, Bluetooth happens to be the closest to her original design. So it's a drastic simplification, but not wrong.

Forgive me if you already know this, but there are reasonable arguments to describe either the Apple I or the Apple ][ as the first real personal computer.

Although Woz engineered both, without his partnership with Jobs, they wouldn't have been consumer products (which even the Apple I was, if barely!).

The reason I used 'Steve Jobs invented the personal computer' as a comparison, isn't that I think it is dead wrong, but that, to use your words, it's a drastic simplification.

The point is that Bluetooth descends from an independent intellectual heritage. No one was aware of her patent. The original experiments with Frequency hopping happened in the early 1900s with Marconi and Tesla. FSK was used for military radio in the 1930s and by the 40s had trickled out into widespread knowledge. Here's an example of a trade magazine from 1948 describing FSK [0] citing military work in the late 1930s, which also says

    It may appear to the reader that this recent advance in telegraph technique is a rather obvious one

Going on to say that it's little studied because there simply isn't a good method to synchronize the transmissions yet. That's what Hedy and others were trying to solve, but the widespread solution would come from the independent invention of Barker codes in 1953. Many decades later when the people at Ericsson were designing what became Bluetooth, they looked at the FCC requirements that had been written to accept FSK radioteletypes in widespread use after the war and common best practices for radio system design.

[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Wireless-World/40s/Wireless...

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