Spread Spectrum
Hedy Lamarr is my hero. Along with George Antheil she invented the first version of frequency hopping that proposed the use of a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The idea was proposed to the Navy, though ultimately they were not interested claiming the system was too bulky. Antheil explicates the Navy’s reasoning:
What a great image.
Yes. Inventer of trunking. uNF!
Frequency hopping is of course a great idea for a secure radio communication. Many great inventions were way ahead of its time such that there were no supporting technology yet in place to enable successful implementation and field deployment. Hedy Lamarr idea was patented in 1942 during which time bulky vacuum tubes were used as main components of electronic circuitry of radio-wave communication, and due to the size and power consumption of the vacuum tubes, only a few can be afforded in a typically very bulky radio transceiver. In fact, due to the bulk of the radio transceiver of the time, Japanese fighter planes often did not carry radio communication gears in order to save weight. Thus there would have been little much room for what else to be packed in a radio inside a torpedo, which is much smaller than a fighter plane. Furthermore, it would be doubtful if the mechanical mechanism of frequency changing as based on piano slotted paper would have enough precision for radio-controlled steering of a highly explosive device.
Then, in the 1950’s someone (DeForrest?) at RCA invented the tiny transistor as replacement for the vacuum tube, which then enable Sylvania in 1957 to incorporate electronic-based frequency hopping into reasonably-sized devices.
Let’s have respects for our military heroes of WWII who have sacrificed much to save the course of the world. Military brass such as Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, Douglas McArthur, John F Kennedy etc. are among the best and the brightest of humans.
Good Postin’
eow
not meaning to feed the troll too much but…
radio controlled weapons were in fairly wide use during WII already by the germans, one of the the things that limited their further use was the jamming that lamarr/antheil’s system would have prevented.
more complex mechanical weapon guidance systems than the player piano controlled radio were used to great effect already at that point(norbert weiner’s work on cybernetics grew out of his designs for controll systems for anti aircraft guns)
kennedy was a lieutenant who had command of a torpedo boat during WWII not some high ranking military brass who made major strategic decisions.
shockley (with bardeen and brattain) invented the transistor in 1947 at bell labs.
Many thanks to dlb for correcting me on the first inventor of the transistor. That’s why I had put a question mark behind “DeForrest?” May be he invented the diode instead, huh? But the gist of the message was that in the 1940’s, electronic circuitry were too bulky, thus had to be greatly simplified in order to fit inside a mobile warhead. The use of spread spectrum radio technology would have required much more complicated circuitry [read: bulky] than can be supported by then existing hardwares. Remember also that the German were ahead of the Allied in many aspects including jet engine and rocketry. Radio-controlled weaponry was not mentioned in military history as part of Allied’s weapon inventory.
JFK has made some of the most important strategic decisions during his tenure as the youngest US president and the first Catholic president ever elected. Unlike subsequent wars, WWII was served by some of the brightest and bravest men on either sides of the Atlantic.
Good postin’ though, dlb!
john hammond (of hammond organ fame, as a side note, notice the ammount of deathmachines invented by electronic musicians, coincidence? I think not!) sucessfully developed a radio controlled torpedo for the navy in 1918. the tools were there in (and before) the 1940’s, the powers that be just didn’t see the value in them, at least until they saw germans sinking allied ships by remote control.
fortunately though boneheaded kneejerk rejection of new technolgies weren’t limited to the allies, konrad zuse independantly invented the first thing that resembled a modern programmable computer in 1936 and couldnt convince the german government to support further development(something about german airplanes being so perfect there is no way an adding machine could improve them or somesuch). turing and the other folks at bletchley park in england then reinvented a similiar device and used it to break the codes used by the enigma machine that the germans used for encrypting messages and the information gained from this was instrumental in winning the war for the allies.
alan turing was then rewarded by the leadership of the allied forces who’s collective ass he had been instrumental in saving by being shunned and persecuted for being a homosexual up until his untimely death.
oh, lee deforrest invented the vaccuum tube in 1906 (though many other people contested his claim as being the sole inventor of it, such as thomas edison who he worked for) RCA wasn’t formed until 1919.
kennedy’s most famous strategic decision (besides that bit about parading about in an open car in texas) was the cuban missle crisis, his communications during that were kept secure using the very same spread spectrum system that had been previously rejected as impossible in one of it’s first major uses. sylvania had waited until 1957 not for the technolgy to catch up but for the lamarr/antheil patent to expire because they didn’t want to have to pay the inventors.
Wow, dlb, your name truly stands for a Data [Large] Base. But why such a pessimism, huh? Technology has been progressing at a more rapid pace since the turn of the 20th century than any other times in human history, such that, even though inventors are initially shunned and ridiculed, eventually and perhaps, too soon, the technology caught on. Such a rapid pace of technological innovation has been disrupting the whole social economic fabric, morality, cultural fabric that are much too slow to catch on to the dizzying pace of technological progress. The side effect of such rapid technological advancement is that people have been subjected to immense amount of stress, pollution and social disruption in the rapid industrial revolution that first swept thru Europe, then to N. America, then to Asia and many other parts of the world. There have been vast extinction of animal species, and massive deforestation in most of the world that are un-sustainable.
Oops! I’ve caught the bug of pessimism from you, dlb, a truly infectious bug.
Nevertheless, the problems caused by technological advancement must be solved by advance environmental technology with emphasis on the preservation of humanity and other animal and plant species in the world.
But going back to the patent of Lamarr/Antheil that was issued in 1942, it would be in-force for 17 years after the issue date, so if Sylvania want to wait out instead of paying royalty to the inventors, they would have chosen to release their electronic version in 1959, not 1957. More likely, it always takes a lot of time to perfect any technology, such that in the majority of the cases, a patent’s life of 17 years would have expired long before the technology can be perfected for commercial release.
Again, good postin’, Mr(s) Data [Large] Base.