Ask most engineers who laid the groundwork for modern wireless and you will hear names like Marconi, Shannon, or the committees behind the IEEE 802.11 standard. Almost no one says Hedy Lamarr. Yet in 1942 the Hollywood movie star co-patented frequency hopping spread spectrum , the technique that quietly keeps your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS working today. It is one of the best stories in wireless history, and it has a real lesson for anyone building connected devices. A movie star, a composer, an