The communications industry was not so easily persuaded. Television networks and manufacturers such as RCA and General Electric feared that spread spectrum would interfere with television signals. Manufacturers of cordless phones, which today use spread spectrum almost exclusively, suspected a plot by the FCC to deny them the narrow channels they preferred by dumping spread spectrum onto them.
Once the FCC understood the industry complaints, it forged an acceptable solution by authorizing spread spectrum in the ISM garbage bands, and then at low (but adequate) wattage. At the same time, and crucially, the commission allowed spread-spectrum communications in those bands to operate without an FCC license, unregulated. That meant that inventors, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers could proceed from conception to market without having to slog through the long, legally complicated, and therefore expensive process of seeking FCC approval. (“Legend has it,” Marcus notes, “that the original unlicensed device was a ‘couch potato’–like remote control for radio receivers.” So the 1939 Philco Mystery Control once again revealed its originality.)
If all this bureaucratic infighting seems obscure, what followed from it is happily familiar. “The rules adopted,” Marcus writes, “had a much greater impact than any of [their] advocates could ever have imagined at the time. They enabled the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the majority of cordless phones now sold in the US, and myriad other lesser-known niche products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more.
A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.
Hedy followed these developments. Sometimes she felt bitter about her lack of recognition as an electronic pioneer. In 1990, when she was seventy-five, she told a reporter for Forbes magazine how she felt. “I can’t understand,” she said, “why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world.” The reporter noted that she was “six times divorced and now living in Miami on a Screen Actors Guild pension” and couldn’t help feeling she’d been wronged. “Never a letter,” Hedy added, “never a thank you, never money. I don’t know. I guess they just take and forget about a person.”
Yet she didn’t let her resentment consume her. Robert Osborne, the journalist and television host, recalled her enthusiasm for life in a late profile:
Few people were ever blessed with a merrier sense of humor, few sailed through the calamities of life with more of a blithe spirit, few apologized less frequently and seemed to be having more fun, even when the bloodhounds were snapping at her ankles. The Hedy I had known since 1963 was game for anything—a picnic, a charade party, a dress-up affair at [the restaurant] “21,” a walk on the beach or a climb over a “No Admittance” barricade to get a look at something she was curious to investigate. Her energy, curiosity and generosity were enormous…. She was colorful without attempting to be and constantly unpredictable…. A sad figure? No way, and certainly not to the lady herself. She neither complained nor apologized. Hedy embraced that “Auntie Mame” philosophy that “life is a banquet.” If there was any tinge of tragedy connected to Hedy Lamarr, it was the fact that she ever had to grow old. When a face had been as flawless and celebrated as hers, it’s not easy greeting birthdays…. So Hedy retreated from the gazes of those who didn’t look deeper. She avoided cameras, shut the doors, kept out of sight, filled her days with activities (and lawsuits) and, with the humor still intact, tolerated the rest of us.
One man who never forgot about Hedy was a retired U.S. Army colonel named Dave Hughes. Hughes, a highly decorated veteran of both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars who lives in Colorado Springs, had retired early from the Army to explore the developing world of wireless digital communications. Something of a maverick, the descendant of eleven generations of Welsh Calvinists, he got interested in setting up free digital wireless for rural schools that couldn’t afford the high cost and charges of dedicated T1 lines strung out forty or a hundred miles across the Colorado prairie. “I wasn’t worried about rural kids getting a computer,” he told me. “They were falling in price and were going to be cheap. The problem was going to be the cost of communications and the evil empires called the phone companies.”
Hughes determined to solve that problem, at least by demonstration. He set up the first computer bulletin board in Colorado Springs, “two-way with a Hayes modem.” He helped Montana link up its 114 one-room schoolhouses with FidoNet, the noncommercial network of linked bulletin boards established by the San Francisco artist, pioneer hacker, and self-styled anarchist Tom Jennings in 1984. Then the National Science Foundation heard about Hughes’s work and came calling. After the NSF investigated, it awarded Hughes a seven-year, $7 million grant to continue exploring digital wireless for rural education. And it was while Hughes was doing due diligence for his NSF grant work, investigating the prior art, that he came across the story of Hedy Lamarr and frequency hopping.
By then, Hughes was connected to the burgeoning digital community in the San Francisco Bay Area through the Well, Stewart Brand’s pre-Web, dial-in version of a linked digital community, and he reported his discovery there. In 1993 he received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that defends digital rights and celebrates electronic pioneering. In 1994, attending an IEEE award ceremony for Mike Marcus, the FCC’s champion of spread spectrum, Hughes was irritated to hear Marcus say that Hedy’s invention was never reduced to practice. “I told him I questioned that,” Hughes says. “Because by this time, Scibor-Marchocki had heard about my discovery and put two and two together. He’d contacted me and told me about his sonobuoy.”
Hughes, a battle veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross who fell in love with Hedy Lamarr when he was thirteen, smelled sexism in the engineering community’s casual dismissal of her contribution. He decided she deserved recognition for her pioneering invention of frequency-hopping spread spectrum. The award he settled on trying to win for her was the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the same award he had received in 1993. (Other recipients: Doug Engelbart, Robert Kahn, Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, pioneers all.) By then, it was 1996. He had become a familiar figure on the Well, and when he reported what he was doing, he says, and explained to the young people who Hedy Lamarr was, “there was a groundswell starting on the Well to endorse the nomination.” He located Hedy’s son Anthony in Los Angeles. The EFF voted the award, to honor George Antheil posthumously as well. Hedy herself was happy to hear of it—“it’s about time,” she told Anthony—but was unwilling to appear in public to receive it. The EFF agreed that Anthony, now fifty years old and a Los Angeles businessman, could do so on her behalf.