This is not a trivial engineering difference. The transition from mechanical to electronic implementation of frequency hopping required the entire semiconductor revolution — the transistor (1947), the integrated circuit (1958), the development of stable crystal oscillators at frequencies high enough for communications use. None of that technology existed when Lamarr and Antheil filed their patent.
In this sense, the patent was genuinely ahead of its time in a specific way: the concept was right, the available technology for implementation was wrong, and the gap between concept and technology required twenty years and a revolution in electronics to close. This is not an unusual situation in the history of technology. Conceptual proposals regularly precede their implementation by years or decades, waiting for manufacturing or materials technology to catch up. The Lamarr-Antheil patent is an example of this pattern, not an exception to it.
## A Note on Sources and the Mythology Problem
Any writer who works on the Hedy Lamarr story confronts a particular hazard: the mythology has become more widely published than the history, and sources that cite the mythology as fact have proliferated to the point where they appear, in web searches and popular summaries, more prominently than the careful scholarship.
The careful scholarship exists. Ruth Barton’s biography Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (2010) is a serious work of research that treats the invention story with the precision it deserves. Stephen Michael Shearer’s Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr (2010) is another. Richard Rhodes’s Hedy’s Folly (2011) is specifically focused on the invention story and benefits from Rhodes’s background in the history of technology. These books do not claim she invented Wi-Fi. They document what she actually did, which is more interesting.