Whether the popular mythology generated by the documentary — “she invented Wi-Fi” — will eventually correct itself as the more careful accounts circulate is uncertain. Myths are persistent, particularly myths that serve clear emotional purposes. The story of the beautiful woman who secretly invented the internet is more shareable than the story of the beautiful woman and her collaborator who articulated an important concept in a 1941 patent that was never implemented in its specific form but contributed to a conceptual tradition that informed much later engineering. The second story is true. The first story is what Twitter produces.
## The Record That Remains
The physical patent document is eleven pages. The drawings show oscillating circuits, condensers, a suction control head, a paper strip with perforations in rows labeled A through H. The text describes, in the careful passive-voice legal language of patent applications, what the mechanism does and how it is claimed to work. The date is August 11, 1942.
Hedy Lamarr is on that document. George Antheil is on that document. Their names appear in the upper left corner of the first page, under the title “Secret Communication System,” above the filing date and the patent number. They are listed as inventors, which they were.
Everything that has been said about this invention — the popular myths, the technical corrections, the institutional failures, the belated recognition — radiates outward from that eleven-page document. The document itself is stable, unchanged, accessible. The stories told about it change with the telling, as all stories about real events change.