While working for the CSIRO, John O’Sullivan was tasked with finding a way for computers to communicate without wires – a wireless system of some type. O’Sullivan remembered his previous research into black holes and the tools he had created to identify the black hole radio waves wirelessly and went back to his work on that project to adapt it for this new purpose.
He used the mathematical formula of this device to modify and tweak it, using this as a basis for Wi-Fi to search out weak and fuzzy radio signals in the noisiest of environments. This re-purposed and unintentional invention earned the CSIRO roughly $1 billion in royalties. He patented it later in the US in 1996, after patenting it in his native country, Portugal, in 1992.