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| Hedy Lamarr in 1930's |
Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) as born 1914 in Vienna Austria to Jewish parents, both considered practicing Christians. Doors opened for her when she performed in a risqué Czech movie. In 1933, she married Fritz Mandl, a wealthy armaments merchant and munitions manufacturer who was in cahoots with the Nazis and sold armaments to Mussolini.
Fritz was not happy with Hedy’s
acting career. To keep her occupied and away from the studio, he hosted lavish
parties where Hitler and Mussolini were in attendance. He’d take Hedy to
business meetings where she listened to wealthy manufacturers discuss how to
jam an enemy’s radio frequencies, to locate and destroy their weapons.
Hedy was not stupid. She may have
looked like a flower to be admired but not acknowledged. At those meetings,
Hedy learned applied sciences.
The marriage was not a good one.
Fritz was a controlling man, very jealous. In her autobiography, Hedy stated he
kept her prisoner in their palatial mansion most of the time.
By 1937 as Hitler’s strength
extended throughout Germany and Austria, as he prepared to spread his rancor
throughout Europe, Hedy disappeared to Paris disguised as a maid. She took most
of Mandl’s jewels with her. While in Paris, she met Louis B. Mayer, and the
rest as they say is history.
Or maybe not...
Even as she was beautiful, Hedy
possessed a brilliant mind. She was an inventor and a scientist. She created
several items and obtained patents for them. She remembered those meetings
Fritz had dragged her to and she loathed the Nazis. She did everything in her
power to try and stop them.
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| George Antheil |
By 1940, Hedy had moved to Hollywood.
During a dinner party, she met George Antheil, a man of like mind. He was an avant-garde
composer. They enjoyed each other’s company and talked of Hedy’s ideas. When the
evening ended, Hedy wrote her phone number with lipstick on George’s windshield:
Call me.
By this time, WW2 was in full
swing. The loss of men at sea each day counted to the several thousands. Allied
ships were being sunk by torpedoes from German U-boats.
Hedy and George realized most of
the weaponry during WW2 was radio controlled. They got together and invented a “Secret
Communications System” (US Patent No. 2,292,387) what today is known as a “Spread
Spectrum Transmission”. If their signals jammed German frequencies, the
weaponry would be sent off course, their munitions rendered useless.
Hedy and George worked out a
radio frequency called “frequency-hopping” that could not be deciphered or
jammed. They set up a sequencer “that would rapidly jump both the control
signal and its receiver through 88 random frequencies” similar to the 88 keys
on a piano.
For explanation purposes on the
patent material, they compared frequency-hopping to a player-piano where the
dots on paper are interspersed at irregular intervals. If someone is trying to
listen to you, the message will be jumbled, undecipherable as if you hop around
indiscriminately rather than walk in a straight line. The sender and receiver
know what these hopping intervals are and can communicate. Someone who does not
know this system would not be able to understand.
Their idea bloomed into an actual
process, then ‘Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil’ sent their designs to
the patent office. Their patent was accepted but the Navy never embraced it.
One obtuse fellow considered it impractical to stick a player-piano into a
torpedo. Their idea was shelved.
But not forgotten...
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| Hedy Lamarr in 1950's |
In his 1945 autobiography, George
Antheil gave Hedy Lamarr full credit for the idea. In the 1950’s private
companies dug the patent out of the archives and began to use its science. A
wireless technology called CDMA was developed (today’s WIFI & Bluetooth).
In the 1960’s the Navy used frequency-hopping during the Cuba Missile Crisis. In the late 1990’s the Electronic Frontier
Foundation gave Hedy an award for her contribution to wireless communications.
Without Hedy Lamarr’s experiences
with her first husband, her unbending dislike of the Nazi’s and her embracement
of the Allied war effort, we would not have wireless communications. Oh, I know
what you are thinking. Someone somewhere would have figured it out, but I say
Hedy’s the girl, the one who spearheaded what we have, today.
Many thanks to:
Wikicommons, Public Domain
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