[marshray]

Ouch.

From the article: "A letter on 3 October 1941 from the Lyon and Lyon attorney to Lamarr and Antheil says '...we rather doubted at the time that method claim 7 would be considered patentable, since the invention appears to reside more in a new apparatus than in a new method.' Thus, the attorney representing the applicants agreed with the patent examiner that the evidence was against Lamarr-Antheil’s definitive method claim to FHSS, which was claim 7."

This analysis makes it pretty clear that EFF's 1997 assertion that she and Antheil "developed and [...] patented the concept of 'frequency-hopping' that is now the basis for the spread spectrum radio systems" is flatly untrue.

This isn't to say that she wasn't an inventor or innovator, or didn't put together existing known techniques in a new way to address a relevant and interesting problem.

[nine_k]

But frequency hopping without the ability to (re-)synchronize is hardly practical. It's like inventing the principle of the machine gun, firing many bullets in quick succession, without inventing the mechanism of automatic removal of the spent shell and pushing in a new round. Such prior art would not dethrone Hiram Maxim.

Same here: if it's the Lamar's invention that makes frequency hopping practical, then she is still the (co-)inventor of most of modern radio communication.

[kragen]

I think you mean it would not dethrone Dr. Gatling, whose contraption did indeed automatically remove spent shells, which illustrates just how fuzzy these questions of attribution are.

[nine_k]

No, Gatling gun was a revolver-type gun, like a few before it, even though it's more automated. Modern Gatling guns, while immensely useful for rapid fire, are powered either electrically or pneumatically (I only handled two, both electrical). They also are damn heavy, because they have so many barrels.The early Gatling guns were gravity-fed, not belt-fed, and were significantly slower than the Maxim machine gun, and required the operator to rotate a crank to keep it operating, so it wasn't even fully automatic.

The Maxim machine gun was the first to offer really practical machine gun experience: a fully automatic weapon which is about as portable as a heavy small firearm, not like a light artillery piece.

[kragen]

This is a towed light artillery piece, like the Gatling, not a heavy small firearm: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ametralladora_Maxim#/media/Arc...

Later versions did become more portable, but the Maxim was always a crew-served weapon. The advent of the fully automatic small firearm was really the Kalashnikov 60 atrocity-filled years later.

It's true that the Gatling required an operator to turn the crank and was significantly slower than the Maxim gun.

[marshray]

The thing approved by the patent office is 100% specific to a mechanism using two "moving" "elongated strips" to encode a sequence of frequency changes. It doesn't explain how they are kept synchronized, or provide a way to recover from loss of sync. Perhaps torpedoes were a case where an initial synchronization would work long enough.

As said before, the idea of coordinated frequency hopping was already known at the time.