Very rarely do celebrities actually invent anything. I tend to think of them as... as... well... celebrities and not really inventors but every once in a while a celebrity comes along and invents something. Which brings us to the question of who invented the internet? I don't know why this subject pops into my head every once in a while and when it does it plagues me. You might think that Al Gore invented the internet which reminds me of a conversation my friends had last week that went something like this,
"I don't believe you."
"Well, I believe myself."
"If you believe yourself, that still does not make two people believing you. You are still just one person."
Which maybe is the reason Al Gore mentioned he invented the internet a bunch of times. Maybe every time he mentions it he thinks it is one more vote to change written history in his favor.
Maybe you think a science fiction writer like William Gibson or something invented the idea of the internet but none of what I've just written is true. I might as well have just made up a story about it raining fish in Australia or something. Oops, wait a minute that's true.
Ok. Here's the real story. George Antheil a pianist from Trenton, New Jersey meets his neighbor Hedy Lamarr in 1940 in Hollywood. Lamarr asks Antheil a question about glands because she would like to enlarge the size of her breasts and the conversation quickly turns to large weapons. Antheil said he would like to track her torpedoes around the neighborhood but Lamarr was more interested in recieving signals from many other friendly transmissions and dodge the enemies' radar field.
So Lamarr went home all hot and bothered and drew up this diagram which was the beginning of frequency hopping. This same technology is still used today to transfer information over radio waves like for cell phones and internet use and stuff. So my candidate for the inventor of the internet (which of course is totally up for debate) is Hedy Lamarr!
