https://astron0mers.com/was-wifi-discovered-accidentally-black-holes/ said:
The black hole connection: seeds of a myth
So where does the black hole story come in? It traces back to fundamental research in radio astronomy, not to Wi-Fi itself. In 1974, British physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that tiny “mini” black holes (much smaller than stars) could evaporate and emit brief radio pulses. This sparked curiosity: could anyone detect those cosmic radio blips? An Australian physicist-engineer, John O’Sullivan (then at the University of Sydney), worked on building a radio telescope to hunt for these faint black-hole signals. The problem was immense: any signal would be microscopic by the time it arrived on Earth and buried in cosmic noise, so it would appear “smeared” and weak. O’Sullivan and his team developed a powerful mathematical tool – based on a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm – to sift tiny, smeared signals from background static.(In fact, CSIRO explains this work as “trying to piece together waves from black holes,” which led them to invent a custom FFT integrated circuit.)
However, despite their efforts, the team never detected the black-hole signals they sought. But importantly, that radio astronomy work was not yet Wi-Fi; it was pure science to test Hawking’s theory. The critical turn came in the early 1990s when O’Sullivan joined CSIRO’s radiophysics lab. By 1992 he was explicitly trying to solve wireless networking problems. He remembered the FFT-based technique from the black-hole search and realized it could help wireless signals. In other words, he intentionally applied the same math to tame indoor echoes and noise for a WLAN. As Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki (ABC Science) explains, “by a wonderful coincidence, [O’Sullivan’s] black hole mathematics turned out to be the key to WiFi,” but it wasn’t luck – he was repurposing a known tool. To summarize the real link: the technique originally developed for astronomy (FFT signal processing) became part of CSIRO’s Wi-Fi patent. It was planned engineering, not a blind accident. CSIRO patented this Wi-Fi technology in Australia in 1992 and in the US in 1996. They built working chips by 2000, and the resulting WLAN went on the market by the late 1990s.
