Topic

Inventions That Changed the Internet

The patents behind the infrastructure and protocols the modern internet runs on.

The internet as we use it today was built on a stack of critical inventions — most of which were patented, and several of which became controversial precisely because of how fundamental they turned out to be. RSA encryption (1977) is why HTTPS exists. LZW compression (1983) powered GIF images before the web even existed, then sparked the first major software patent controversy. PageRank (1998) made search actually useful. Frequency hopping spread spectrum — Hedy Lamarr's 1942 patent — became the foundation of WiFi and Bluetooth. None of these inventors could have known what they were building toward.

Patents in this topic

US 4405829 · 1983

How RSA Public-Key Encryption Secures Digital Messages

This patent describes the RSA public-key cryptographic system, a method for securely sending digital messages by using a public key to encrypt and a private key to decrypt, based on the mathematical difficulty of factoring large numbers.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

US 6285999 · 2001

How Websites Get Ranked by Who Links to Them

This patent describes a computer method for scoring web pages or other linked documents based on the importance of the pages that link to them, helping search engines find better results.

Leland Stanford Junior University

US 5960411 · 1999

How Amazon's One-Click Online Ordering System Works

Amazon's 1997 patent describes a method for buying an item online with just one click, by using previously stored customer and payment information, bypassing the traditional multi-step shopping cart process.

Amazon com Inc

US 4558302 · 1985

How Computers Shrink Data by Finding Repeated Patterns

This patent describes a method for compressing data by finding the longest repeating sequences of characters, assigning them short codes, and building a dictionary of these sequences for both compression and decompression.

Sperry Corp

US 2292387 · 1942

Hedy Lamarr's Secret Radio System for Torpedo Guidance

Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil's 1942 patent describes a secret communication system that rapidly changes radio frequencies to prevent enemies from jamming or eavesdropping on torpedo guidance signals.

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