Tech History: How Detecting Black Holes Led to WiFi

Wi-Fi is something we rely on every day—for work, streaming, gaming, even smart appliances. But did you know it was discovered by accident… while trying to detect exploding black holes?

That’s not science fiction—it’s tech history.

The Accidental Breakthrough

In the early 1990s, Dr. John O’Sullivan, an Australian engineer working with the national science agency CSIRO, was part of a team trying to build a system to detect the radiowave signatures of black hole explosions.

The problem? Radio signals tend to scatter and reflect, making them hard to detect and analyze. To solve this, the team developed a mathematical method to interpret scattered signals more accurately.

The black hole detection project didn’t pan out…But their signal-processing algorithm did. That same method became the foundation for what we now call Wi-Fi.

From Deep Space to Daily Life

O’Sullivan and his team realized that their algorithm could help decode messy radio signals in cluttered environments like homes or offices—exactly the challenge that early wireless networking was facing.

By 1996, CSIRO had patented the technology, and it eventually became an industry standard. Today, billions of devices use Wi-Fi, all thanks to a failed cosmic experiment.