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Technology By Kaleeg Editorial Team July 13, 2018 2 min read

Wi-Fi Was Invented By Accident!

Curious minds, this one’s for you. We’ve put together several genuinely fascinating facts about Wi-Fi Was Invented By Accident!, carefully reviewed by our team to ensure every single one is accurate and worth your time. Let’s dive in.

What were the signals?

What were the signals?

These signals had traveled such vast distances and were so small and distorted by the gas and dust of space they had passed through.

This meant their waveform had altered from a sharp and easily identifiable spike, to a flattened curve.

It was because of this that O’Sullivan and his researches contemporaries got to work on creating a tool that could identify and filter specific radio waves.

After lots of hard work, O’Sullivan and a colleague were able to create a tool based off a mathematical formula which would help them find these waves, blocking out the extraneous radio signals to identify the useful ones.

However, they were unsuccessful in finding a black hole’s radio waves.

Fast forward to 1992…

Fast forward to 1992...

John O’Sullivan was working for the CSIRO and was tasked with finding a way for computers to communicate without wires – a wireless system of some type.

Remembering his previous research into black holes and the tools he’d created to identify the black hole radio waves wirelessly, O’Sullivan went back to the tool he’d previously made.

Using the mathematical formula of this device he was able to modify and tweak it, using this as a basis for Wi-Fi to search out weak and fuzzy radio signals in the noisiest of environments.

This re-purposed and unintentional invention earned the CSIRO roughly $1 billion in royalties.

O’Sullivan patented it in his native country first in 1992, then later in the U.S. in 1996.

So, thank you to Stephen Hawking for inspiring John O’Sullivan to accidentally give us all Wi-Fi!

The Bottom Line: From the surprising to the thought-provoking, Wi-Fi Was Invented By Accident! has more layers than most people ever get to explore. These several facts are a great starting point. Which one surprised you most? We’d love to hear from you!

Kaleeg Editorial Team

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Kaleeg Editorial Team

Our editorial team at Kaleeg is passionate about researching, verifying, and presenting fascinating facts from around the world. With a commitment to accuracy and engaging storytelling, we curate content across animals, science, history, culture, sports, and technology. Every article is reviewed for factual accuracy before publication.