Hollywood (H)IT

 

Imagine you are playing the piano and suddenly you get an inspiration about how to radio control a torpedo. You develop the concept and patent it. Twenty years later, your idea is used in the ships sent to blockade an enemy country.

Fast forward 20 years. The government declassifies the technology and a whole lot of commercial applications employing the concept are launched, including an amazing company whose stock once shot up 25 times within a single year.

Twenty more years later, your concept is still the source of another phenomenon sweeping across the business world.

You would probably be called a genius and known as an expert in the field of communications.

Well, this actually happened. And the person who thought through the initial concept was never considered a communications expert. In fact, for a very long time she was not considered anything more than just sultry Hollywood actress marketed as the "Most beautiful girl in the world!" by MGM's publicity department, which--according to her co-inventor--"Decided to make her faintly stupid in order to give her sufficient sex appeal."

Her idea was awarded the US Patent number 2292387 on Aug. 11, 1942. The patent was about a frequency-hopping radio encryption technique, which was later called spread-spectrum technology. Qualcomm, the company mentioned above, used it to develop its Code-Division-Multiple-Access…

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