Wi-Fi

or: black hole math for bathroom cat videos

A radio astronomer in the Netherlands spent years hunting for split-second bursts of radio waves from exploding black holes, and the equipment was so slow that his team had to photograph the signals on film and do the math with lenses¹. Nobody ever caught a black hole exploding, but the frustration turned into a fast math chip, and in the early 1990s his team at Australia’s national science agency used the same tricks to untangle radio echoes bouncing off every wall in a room². The patent ended up inside billions of devices and earned the agency more than $430 million³.

And we use it to watch cat videos on the toilet.

How it works, badly

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An astronomer went looking for exploding black holes.
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He never saw one, but the math for it became a chip.
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Indoors, radio bounces off everything; the chip untangles the echoes.
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Now it streams cat videos to the toilet.

Wait, is that real?

Yes, the astronomy is real, and so is the patent money.

The black hole hunt↩

John O’Sullivan, an Australian radio engineer, worked at the Netherlands Foundation for Radio Astronomy (now ASTRON) from 1974 to 1983. There he was part of a group searching for pulses of radio waves lasting nanoseconds, which theory said exploding black holes might give off. Recording gear of the day couldn’t capture pulses that short, so the team put the signals on film and ran optical Fourier transforms on the images, which was slow and cumbersome.

The echo problem↩

Back at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, that frustration helped lead to a fast Fourier transform chip in the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s, O’Sullivan led a CSIRO team that used the same techniques on wireless networking. Indoors, radio waves at a few gigahertz bounce off walls, floors, ceilings and furniture, so each signal arrives as a smear of echoes. Splitting the data up, sending it, and recombining it lets the receiver throw most of those reflections away. The team was aiming for 100 Mbps when wireless networks of the time managed 1 to 2.

The patent↩

CSIRO filed its first wireless LAN patent in Australia in 1992, and the U.S. patent was granted in 1996. According to the National Museum of Australia, by 2012 licences with 23 companies had generated more than $430 million, and by 2015 settlements had passed $450 million. The 2012 European Inventor Award citation said the technology is used in billions of devices.

The fine print↩

The museum counts in Australian dollars, so the U.S. figure is smaller. Wi-Fi is built from many people’s inventions, not one; CSIRO’s patent covers one key part, it was fought in court for years, and the oldest 802.11b-only gear doesn’t use it. Nobody has ever detected an exploding black hole, which is why the search found nothing to photograph. The cat videos are optional.

Sources: CSIRO ATNF: from radio astronomy to wireless communication; National Museum of Australia: Wi-Fi; Wikipedia: John O’Sullivan (engineer)

Last fact-checked October 29, 2026.