Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr

An Austrian-American actress and self-taught inventor who, with composer George Antheil, patented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum system in 1942, designed to stop enemy jamming of radio-guided torpedoes by rapidly switching transmission frequencies in a pattern only the receiver knew. The US Navy did not adopt the system during the war, but the underlying idea became the basis for spread-spectrum technologies used in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS, the wireless infrastructure that most AI systems and services now run on. (See also: Compute)