GPS satellites broadcast navigation signals in a technique called Code Division Multiple Access — each satellite broadcasts on the same carrier frequency but with a unique pseudorandom code that distinguishes its signal from every other satellite’s signal. A GPS receiver can listen to multiple satellites simultaneously because it knows each satellite’s code and can separate the overlapping signals. This is spread-spectrum in a different form: the signal is spread across the frequency band by the pseudorandom code rather than by hopping, but the principle of using shared-sequence unpredictability to enable secure, interference-resistant communication is the same.
Modern Wi-Fi uses OFDM — Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing — in which the data stream is divided among many parallel subcarriers transmitted simultaneously, each modulated at a relatively slow rate. This is not frequency hopping in the sense the patent describes, but it uses the distribution of signal across frequency space as a tool for robustness and interference resistance. The family resemblance is real even when the specific technique differs.
The point is not that every modern wireless system “comes from” Lamarr and Antheil. It does not. The point is that the conceptual insight — use coordinated, unpredictable frequency distribution to make wireless communication more secure and robust — turned out to be foundational to the wireless world, and the Lamarr-Antheil patent was one of the first places that insight appeared in a detailed, specific, legally documented form.
That is a real contribution. It sits in the public record. Patent number US 2,292,387.
## The End
Hedy Lamarr was buried — partially — in Vienna. Her ashes were divided, as she had requested: some scattered in the Vienna Woods, some interred at the Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery, in a section that holds some of the most famous names in Austrian cultural history. Beethoven is there. Brahms. Schubert. Johann Strauss father and son. Franz Lehár. Now Lamarr.