Re:Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Si...
by InitialLastName on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:20AM
(#27118409)
I don't take too much offense at that one; frequency hopping is a hard enough thing to explain to a lay-person, but it is an enabling technology for wifi. It's like saying Albert Einstein invented the atom bomb... wrong, but not an absurd misunderstanding.
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Re:Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Si...
by Kalium on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:40AM
(#27118631)
I get it as an innocent misunderstanding. Certainly the role of enabling technologies is often underplayed in lay understanding of technological advancements.
I'm a bit more skeptical when it's a deliberate misrepresentation. You can claim with equal credibility that Guglielmo Marconi invented wifi.
Re:Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Si...
by InitialLastName on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:52AM
(#27118783)
I guess the moral of the story is that most modern technologies don't lend themselves well to the popular narrative of a solo inventor, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize the contributions of people who had the good ideas that made them possible.
None of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon or William Shockley really invented the modern computer, but they all helped quite a bit.