On May 31, 1870 Belgian immigrant Edward J de Smedt who was at Columbia University in New York City patented asphalt pavement. So we all know what asphalt is, as we all drive on it, and have all felt that heat rising off of it in the summer! But do you know how it is made? I didn’t until I started to deal with it at my job. From Wikipedia:
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for the “Secret Communications System” was granted to George Anthiel and 
his neighbor Hedy Kiesler Markey who was better known as actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr was once called the “most beautiful woman in Europe,” and often referred to as the most gorgeous and exotic of Hollywood’s leading ladies! The patent was for a device which would use frequency-hopping to avoid jamming of a things like radio controlled torpedoes. The device used a piano roll to unpredictably chnge the signal sent between a control center and the torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies in the radio-frequency spectrum. the specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and the torpedo. It would be practically impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies, as this would require too much power or complexity. The frequency-hopping sequence was controlled by a player-piano mechanism, which Anthiel had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique
