this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Recognize the mother of Wifi (i.imgflip.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
151 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

Calling Hedy Lamarr "the Mother of Wifi" because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, "the Father of the iPhone".

[–] [email protected] 44 points 7 months ago (3 children)

i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You could always call him "the father of the capacitive touchscreen".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

that’s what the word “inventor” is for

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Would that make him the grandfather of smartphones?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Shout out also to John Underkoffler who was the technical advisor on Minority Report (and later Iron Man). The gesture controls in that movie heavily inspired the first smartphones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

this is crazy cool info, do you have further reading?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

He did a TED talk in 2010 and there are several articles about him. Not much news in recent years, I guess he wasn't very succesful in turning his motion control concept into a viable product. I interviewed him about eight years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Capacitive touchscreens are a big deal but it kind of minimizes the work of the other technology that goes into a smartphone, like wireless internet, low power mobile CPUs capable of 3D graphics, lithium-ion battery packs, etc., to say nothing of the design engineers that worked on the exterior, the hardware, and the operating system and deserve credit for the iPhone way more than he does. Crediting the holder of a patent from over 40 years before the iPhone hit the market with the creation of the iPhone is stretching the truth at best.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

children generally are able to have multiple parents.

if i give credit to Alice for being Bobby’s mother, i’m not minimizing the parenthood of any of Bobby’s other parents. just giving credit where due.

i would not hesitate to give a couple dozen people the title of father/mother/parent of the iPhone. seems quite appropriate and fair.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Capacitive touchscreens are the essential technology not just in the iPhone but in all smartphones. Without them we’d still be using flip phones and BlackBerry chiclet keyboards. I think it’s fair to call Johnson the father of the smartphone!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How about father of the touch screen? There's a fuck ton of technology in smartphones.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There is, but most of that technology was in phones and other devices before smartphones came along.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

And touch screens were in devices other than smart phones before smart phones came along.

So again, father of the touchscreen, sure. But he did not make smartphones happen. He has nothing to do with 99% of the technology in smartphones.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

He invented the capacitive touch screen. The resistive touch screen was in many devices long before smart phones (bank machines being a common example). The resistive touch screen was fine for those applications but it was useless for the smart phone (too slow to respond). The capacitive touch screen’s first killer app was the smartphone, namely the iPhone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Sure, but the touchscreen is arguably the thing that defines a smartphone. It is the part you interact with and the only part the user really sees.

We had phones before capable of surfing the web and taking and editing pictures. Like Blackberry. But those aren't really seen as smartphones, more like slightly smarter dumbphones.