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Fixed Wireless Business

Thank You, Hedy Lamarr

Members of the ISP-Wireless list delve into the military origins of fixed wireless broadband technology, including the key role played by a famous movie actress.

[October 22, 2002]

On the ISP-Wireless list in September, VP asked,

"Can anyone tell me how and where wireless Internet started?"

A number of respondents suggested that it started with the U.S. military:

[DN noted] "Wireless digital spread spectrum radio was first used by the U.S. military as an encryption method. It was then 'found out' by civilians, and the FCC was pushed to permit civilian use."

[DB agreed] "Uncle Sam is probably the originator. In July, 1970, the first packet radio, ALOHAnet, was operational at the University of Hawaii, under Norm Abramson, using the concept of random packet transmission. See this article."

[SS added] "ALOHAnet was correct. It the first use of wireless in the Internet. It's a little-known fact that ALOHAnet inspired Ethernet. In the early days of the Internet, continuing to the present, satellite links were used extensively for Internet connectivity. Satellite is still the only source of Internet for the entire continent of Antarctica."

Others looked at early U.S. commercial applications:

[SS observed] "Packet Radio, as used by the military, considerably predates wireless Internet. The FCC first authorized license-exempt use of the ISM bands approximately 15 years ago. The first vendors I'm aware of that made use of spread spectrum for license-exempt operations were Proxim, Cylink, and Tetherless Access, Ltd. Metricom began its first operations (their meter-reading operation) in the mid-to-late 80's, if memory serves."

[RB recalled] "The first one on the market with an ISM unit was NCR. Called it WaveLAN. Heard of it? The others followed: NCR of Dayton, OH was bought by AT&T, who then renamed it AT&T/GIS, standing for Global Information Systems. Of course, the names it has had since then are all pretty familiar-sounding: Lucent, Orinoco, Agere, Avaya, and now Proxim. Proxim is the last (and current) name for what was the NCR WaveLAN product line."

[JK added] "The first widespread serious use of wireless Internet as we know it, by the public at large, was a package by Phil Karn called KA9Q NET. It allowed TCP/IP access of the Internet using amateur radio. Phil lists the history of it here."

DH said that Hedy Lamarr was responsible for the wireless Internet:

"If you really wanna know what started wireless down the path to Internet, you gotta go back to the 1940s movie star Hedy Lamarr. While still a teenager, and a world-class beauty, in Austria just before World War II (while married to the Austrian arms manufacturer Fritz Mandel) she was forced by her husband to attend all his technical meetings with the German military as his gorgeous hostess. She had no technical training, only acting training, but she had a sharp technical mind, as later events showed."

"She began to see what the Nazis stood for, hated them, did not like her husband who kept her virtually a prisoner (an arranged marriage by her prominent Vienna father), but got what amounted to a technical education at those meetings. The Germans couldn't figure out a way to guide torpedoes by radio in a way that could not be jammed. She kept her mouth shut, drugged her maid, got out through the window, escaped to England, and went on stage to make a living. Louis Mayer, the Hollywood impresario, saw her and said, 'You're the most beautiful woman in the world. Come to Hollywood, and I'll make you a star.'"

"She didn't want to become a movie star: she wanted to join the National Inventors' Council. George Kettering, the GM manager, whom President Roosevelt asked to form the Council so that Americans could contribute inventions for the coming war effort, knew she was bright, but explained that they needed actors and actresses to help sell War Bonds. So she became a Hollywood actress, and agreed to kiss any man who bought $50,000 in War Bonds. She cleared $7 million one day in 1941."

"She was playing four-hand piano one day with George Antheil, a musical hacker (who had used aircraft propellers as percussion instruments in Carnegie Hall) when she stopped and said 'That's the answer to the torpedo problem: we are together, but apart. We are synchronized, but independent.'"

"So she uttered the words 'frequency hopping,' and they set about to write a patent which did frequency hopping mechanically, using a piano roll tape with 88 holes to control both the radio on the sub and in the torpedo. They took out a U.S. Patent filed on June 10th, 1941, and awarded August 11th, 1942: U.S. Patent #2,292,387, called 'Secret Communications.' They gave it for free to the U.S. Navy, and she didn't get a dime. The Navy immediately saw the merit in it, classified it, and tried to make it work mechanically through the war. But it wasn't reliable enough."

"In 1958, the Naval Contract Engineer Romuald Ireneus Scibor-Marchocki used a computer chip to do the frequency hopping between radios on land and out to a buoy. That worked so well that frequency hopping became a major secure communications method in the Navy by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then all the other services jumped on board, and the U.S. Military prevented the FCC from allowing manufacturers to make radios based on spread spectrum technology. But for a number of reasons, in 1981, the FCC proposed rules permitting 100 watts of power crossing any frequencies. And in 1985, after a bloody fight, the first spread spectrum rules for general public use were approved: the Part 15 rules you love to hate."

—End