US Patent: 2,292,387
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| Secret communication system
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Patentees:
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| George Antheil (exact or similar names) - Manhattan Beach, CA |
| Hedy Kiesler Markey (exact or similar names) - Los Angeles, CA |
| USPTO Classifications: |
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200/46, 200/81.4, 244/189, 244/3.14, 331/37, 331/48, 331/49, 340/13.27, 340/4.2, 346/37, 370/350, 380/34
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| Manufacturer: |
| Not known to have been produced |
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Patent Dates:
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| Applied: |
Jun. 10, 1941 |
| Granted: |
Aug. 11, 1942 |
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Jeff Joslin
Article on the development of frequency hopping
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Description: |
| This patent is famous primarily because of inventor Hedy Kiesler, better known as Hedy Lamarr. By the time this patent was issued she had divorced second husband Gene Markey. Her first husband, Fritz Mandl, was a Nazi-supporting arms dealer and through him she learned of a problem with radio-guided torpedoes: the radio signals were easily jammed. Kiesler had the idea to defeat jamming attempts by transmitting on rapidly changing frequencies, which required synchronizing sender and receiver. She discussed this idea with a friend, composer George Antheil, who as it happened had developed a mechanism to synchronize piano rolls for a multi-planer-piano composition he had written, and together they realized that this mechanism could be used for a frequency-hopping radio system. A Caltech Professor of electrical engineering helped them with the electrical portion of the design, and the two inventors obtained this patent.In recent years this invention has been credited, hyperbolically, as the "basis for Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth." In fact, this patent only covers the specific mechanism used to implement frequency hopping, a mechanism which was unsuccessful in practice because of its complexity and mechanical delicacy. The idea of frequency hopping was not new but Kiesler likely created it independently. German radio engineers were aware of the concept before World War II but in contrast to Kiesler and Antheil they did not develop an implementation. US patents 1,869,659 and 2,495,727 are related to frequency-hopping radios. The first patent preceded Kiesler and Antheil by a decade and although it contains the basic idea of frequency hopping, the idea is not fully developed. The second patent comes after but is much more fully developed and provides a more practical implementation. For more information on this topic, see the American Scientist article on frequency hopping (link below the patent image). |
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