What’s your evidence, Richard Easton??!?

  • olutukko@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    that’s not how it works. edit: others pointed it out already it seems. you would still call the inventor of a first car the father lf cars even though it has nothing to do with modern cars

    edit2: but considering that she didn’t really invent wifi, just frequency hopping, I would maybe call her grandmother or something

    • h3ndrik@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      Yeah, I think I get it. I mean the analogy is a bit flawed. What she invented is that alike synchronizing the rolls of player pianos, you could build a mechanism that hops frequencies (instead of piano keys) to make remote controlling torpedos resilient against jamming.

      Idk. To me it feels like calling the inventor of three-wheeled vehicles the father/mother of cars, if we want to stay with that analogy. It’s remotely related, not an integral part and nowadays solved differently. But the first car was a tricycle. (Benz Patent-Motorwagen)

      But I don’t want to invalidate her achievements either… It’s one (important) contribution to technology. And it’s not always that one single person invents the whole concept of a radio. Or a car. And get’s to be the whole parent of it. Things build upon each other. Sometimes it needs a lot of contributions of several individuals to make something possible… Nowadays more so than in the old times.

    • g_the_b@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      She didn’t invent frequency hopping, Nicola Tesla did. She invented a system that used a piano roll (from a player piano) to alternate frequencies. Also she shared the patent with another person.

      • balp@feddit.nu
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        6 months ago

        Or rather she was part of a team, with her husband and one more, that patented that idea, never really got it to work in real torpedos, and the technology was forgotten until someone referred to it in a later patent. Then her role as background got expanded to take the role of other more influential women, maybe because she had a nicer picture.