Beauty With Brains

Austrian born film star, Hedy Lamarr, of the 1930s and 40s was also a gifted electrical engineer. She was actually born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria back on November 9 th, 1913. In 1933 (at age nineteen), her parents placed her into an arranged marriage with an Austrian armament manufacturer named Fritz Mandl. Mandl was the type of shady character who would sell arms to anyone, even if it meant selling them in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Of course, to make these deals, Mandl had to entertain all of his prospects. This included attending hundreds of dinners with the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. And what would a business dinner be like without Mandl's gorgeous and equally famous wife dazzling these arms developers, buyers, and manufacturers? But Hedy did not just entertain these men. She listened carefully and learned a great deal.

To an outsider, Hedy had everything. She was married to one of the wealthiest men in Europe. She lived in the famous Salzburg castle where the Sound of Music was filmed. Add to that all the clothes, jewelry, servants, and cars one could ever want and it sounds like the ideal life, but it was not.

Hedy, became more of a trophy than a wife to Mandl. He was a control freak and would not even let her go swimming without his supervision. After four years of marriage, Hedy could take no more. The other lead character in this story, George Antheil, was internationally famous for his mechanistic avant-garde musical style. In the summer of 1940, Lamarr sought out Antheil. They were neighbours in Hollywood and supposedly met at a party. The topic of conversation changed to the impending war and torpedoes. Lamarr feared Hitler (remember that she actually knew the guy) and began to talk about an idea that she had for the radio control of torpedoes. At the time, radio control sounded like a great idea, but was not practical. All one had to do was jam the particular frequency that the torpedo operated on and the missile would fail to reach its target.
Lamarr was sitting at the piano with Antheil when that flash of genius struck her. Antheil was hitting keys on the piano and she would follow. It became clear that Antheil was changing the keys that he was hitting, yet he was still able to communicate to her. What if this could be translated into radio control for a torpedo?

The next day they sat on his floor and figured the whole scheme out. Lamarr realised that the frequency needed to randomly change so that the enemy could not jam it. Any attempt to knock out the signal controlling the missile would only knock out a small blip of the communication stream and have virtually no effect on its overall control. Hence, the concept known as "frequency hopping" was born.

Of course, getting this grand scheme to actually work was another story. Keep in mind that this was the time of large vacuum tubes, not the miniaturised microprocessors that rule our world today. Antheil offered the solution to the problem. He had previously composed his Ballet Mechanique , which was scored for sixteen player pianos to perform at the same time. He suggested using punched piano rolls to keep the radio transmitter and torpedo receiver in synch. The transmitting signal was designed to broadcast over a band of eighty-eight possible frequencies - one for each key of the piano keyboard.

It took Lamarr and Antheil several months to work out the exact details of their invention. Then, in December of 1940, they sent a description of their idea to the National Inventor's Council (set up by the government to get ideas from the general public). Very few of the hundreds of thousands of submissions that the Council ever received actually caused any kind of excitement, but Lamarr and Antheil's did. Under the direction of the Council's chairman (and inventive bigwig over at General Motors) Charles Kettering, the government helped to improve on the concept. Patent 2,292,387 for the "Secret Communication System" was granted on August 11, 1942. (The patent is actually under her married name at the time - Hedy Kiesler Markey.)

In 1957, engineers at the Sylvania Electronics Systems Division, located in Buffalo, New York, used transistor electronics to accomplish the goal that Lamarr and Antheil had set out to conquer years before. Finally, in 1962 (three years after the Lamarr/Antheil patent expired), the concept of frequency hopping was used by the United States government in the communication systems placed aboard ships sent out to blockade Cuba.

Today, the concept is not only used by the military (it is used in the Milstar defense communications satellite system), but has also become the technology behind the latest in wireless Internet transmission and the newest cellular phones. A quick search of the United States Patent Office shows 1203 patents dealing with frequency shifting (now called "spread spectrum") between 1995 and 1997. How much influence the Lamarr-Antheil patent has had, if any, on this technology will probably never be known.

Lamarr never earned a penny from this invention that so many others have profited from. Instead, she slowly faded from public view. On March 12, 1997, Hedy Lamarr was finally honoured by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for her great contribution to society. Her son Anthony Loder accepted the award for his mother and played an audio-tape for the audience - the first time she had publicly spoken in over two decades. Hedy Lamarr passed away on January 19, 2000 at her Casselberry home in Florida.