On August 11, 1942, MGM movie star Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil were awarded US Patent Number 2,292,387 for their "Secret Communications System".

Lamarr had told Antheil about her idea for a Secret Communications System that could guide torpedoes to their target without being intercepted by the enemy, by sending messages between transmitter and receiver over multiple radio frequencies in a random pattern. The message would move so quickly across the radio waves that anyone tuning in to a particular frequency would only hear a blip, and would be unable to intercept the message.

Lamarr and Antheil knew they had something that could help win the war. They sent their invention to the recently established National Inventors Council, and Antheil claimed that Charles Kettering himself, director of the Council and research director at General Motors, encouraged them to patent it. The two inventors worked with an MIT electrical engineer to iron out some technical kinks, and submitted their patent proposal in 1941. Rather than develop the patent commercially, they gave it away to the government for the war effort.

Initially, spread spectrum remained a military data communications technology. In the mid-1980s, the US military declassified spread-spectrum technology, and the commercial sector began to develop it for consumer use.

Features of Spread Spectrum that benefit aviation include its non-interfering characteristic and its immunity to interference and jamming.  This virtue results from the fact that it is transmitted at a very low power, actually below the maximum allowable EMI emissions of DO-160C; thus the FAA considers the signal as acceptable non-interfering noise.   It is virtually immune to interference and jamming because it is rapidly sending its digital code across many frequencies.