Introduction

Britney Spears, was not the first star to juggle the weight of fame and a giftfor technical matters. Austrian born film star, Hedy Lamarr, of the 1930 and40s was also a gifted electrical engineer.

Lamarr was frequently quoted as saying, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." She may have played that role on the silver screen, but when it came toreal life, Hedy proved that brainpower was everything.
Before examining her important contribution, let's take a quick look at herbackground.

First of all, Lamarr was only her stage name. She was actually born Hedwig EvaMaria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria back on November 9 th, 1913.

As a teenager, Hedy attended acting school and quickly made the transition intofilms. Like most movie stars, her first few films were forgettable. Yet, theone that she made at age seventeen made her an international star. A verycontroversial star, that is. In the 1933, Czech film Ecstasy, Lamarr acted in asteamy love scene and appeared nude in a 10-minute swimming sequence. That wasdefinitely not the thing to do. While mild by today's standards, her nudity wasconsidered morally unacceptable at the time, and the film was banned in theUnited States for several years on charges of indecency.

In 1933 (at age nineteen), her parents placed her into an arranged marriagewith an Austrian armament manufacturer named Fritz Mandl. Mandl was the type ofshady character who would sell arms to anyone, even if it meant selling them inviolation 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 andMussolini. And what would a business dinner be like without Mandl's gorgeousand equally famous wife dazzling these arms developers, buyers, andmanufacturers? But, as we will soon learn from the outcome of this story, Hedydid not just entertain these men. She listened carefully and learned a greatdeal.

To an outsider, Hedy had everything. She was married to one of the wealthiestmen in Europe. She lived in the famous Salzburg castle where the Sound of Musicwas filmed. Add to that all the clothes, jewellery, servants, and cars (one1935 Mercedes owned by Mandl sold for over $200,000 several years ago) onecould ever want. It sure sounds like the ideal life to me, but it was not.

Hedy, became more of a trophy than a wife to Mandl. He was a control freak andwould not even let her go swimming without his supervision. After four years ofmarriage, Hedy could take no more. She decided to escape.
In her first attempt to see if she could get away, Mandl followed her. She wasforced to sneak into a club that had peep shows upstairs. Hedy paid off theattendant to keep his mouth shut, but Mandl paid even more to get in. Hedy wasforced to hide in one of the rooms. While in there, a male customer came in andassumed that she was the lady he had hired. Without going into all of thedetails, Hedy was forced into the position of making love to the man to avoidher husband (she claimed that he was banging on the door).

During her real escape, Hedy supposedly drugged the maid that was assigned toher, put on a maid's uniform, and walked out the service entrance to freedom.Hedy eventually made it to London where she appeared on the stage.

Hedy, hopped aboard the shipNormandieon a cruise for Hollywood and stardom. She signed a contract with MGM's LouisB. Mayer while on the boat, but he insisted on a name change to avoid thecontroversy from Ecstasy. At this point, MGM publicist Howard Strickland(according to a 1970 New York Times article) approached Hedy and handed her atypewritten list of last names and asked her to make a choice. You guessed it -she chose Lamarr and the rest is Hollywood history. Lamarr was immediatelycrowned the most beautiful woman in the world by MGM and quickly became one ofHollywood's glamour gals.
Which leads us to the real focus of this story - her incredible invention.

The other lead character in this story, George Antheil. Antheil wasinternationally famous for his mechanistic avant-garde musical style. WhenAntheil moved to Hollywood, he became a film composer and a syndicatedcolumnist for Esquire magazine, for which he also contributed articles onromance and endocrinology. He even published a book on the subject – the 1937Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology. What made him an expert on this subject one will never know. In the summer of1940, Lamarr sought out Antheil. They were neighbours in Hollywood andsupposedly met at a party. The topic of conversation changed to the impendingwar and torpedoes. Lamarr feared Hitler (remember that she actually knew theguy) and began to talk about an idea that she had for the radio control oftorpedoes. At the time, radio control sounded like a great idea, but was notpractical. All one had to do was jam the particular frequency that the torpedooperated on and the missile would fail to reach its target.

Lamarr was sitting at the piano with Antheil when that flash of genius struckher. Antheil was hitting keys on the piano and she would follow. It becameclear that Antheil was changing the keys that he was hitting, yet he was stillable to communicate to her. What if this could be translated into radio controlfor a torpedo?

The next day they sat on his floor and figured the whole scheme out. Lamarrrealised that the frequency needed to randomly change so that the enemy couldnot jam it. Any attempt to knock out the signal controlling the missile wouldonly knock out a small blip of the communication stream and have virtually noeffect 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. Keepin mind that this was the time of large vacuum tubes, not the miniaturisedmicroprocessors that rule our world today.

Antheil offered the solution to the problem. He had previously composed hisBallet Mechanique, which was scored for sixteen player pianos to perform at the same time. Hesuggested using punched piano rolls to keep the radio transmitter and torpedoreceiver in synch. The transmitting signal was designed to broadcast over aband of eighty-eight possible frequencies - one for each key of the pianokeyboard.
It took Lamarr and Antheil several months to work out the exact details oftheir invention.

Then, in December of 1940, they sent a description of their idea to theNational Inventor's Council (set up by the government to get ideas from thegeneral public). Very few of the hundreds of thousands of submissions that theCouncil ever received actually caused any kind of excitement, but Lamarr andAntheil's did. Under the direction of the Council's chairman (and inventivebigwig over at General Motors) Charles Kettering, the government helped toimprove 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 nameat the time - Hedy Kiesler Markey.)

Unfortunately, other members of the council were less than enthusiastic.There's no surprise here - just think about the feasibility of placing asynchronised player piano mechanism into a torpedo and having it operateproperly. The Navy declared the mechanism too cumbersome and shelved the idea.The concept of frequency hopping was too far ahead of its time. Lamarr andAntheil pursued their invention no further.

Yet, Lamarr was still able to help out in another way - by selling war bonds.As part of one promotion, anyone that purchased $25,000 worth of bonds couldget a kiss from Lamarr. She was actually able to sell $7 million worth in onenight.

Not all great ideas are forgotten, however. In 1957, engineers at the SylvaniaElectronics Systems Division, located in Buffalo, New York, used transistorelectronics to accomplish the goal that Lamarr and Antheil had set out toconquer years before. Finally, in 1962 (three years after the Lamarr/Antheilpatent expired), the concept of frequency hopping was used by the United Statesgovernment in the communication systems placed aboard ships sent out toblockade Cuba.

Today, the concept is not only used by the military (it is used in the Milstardefence communications satellite system), but has also become the technologybehind the latest in wireless Internet transmission and the newest cellularphones. A quick search of the United States Patent Office shows 1203 patentsdealing with frequency shifting (now called "spread spectrum") between 1995 and1997. How much influence the Lamarr-Antheil patent has had, if any, on thistechnology will probably never be known.

Lamarr never earned a penny from this invention that so many others haveprofited from. Instead, she slowly faded from public view. She was married anddivorced six times between 1933 and 1965 to Fritz Mandl, Gene Markey, Sir JohnLoder, Ted Stauffer, W. Howard Lee (who later married actress Gene Tierney ,and Lewis J. Boles. In 1966, Lamarr made international headlines when she wasarrested for shoplifting in the May department store in Los Angeles, but wasacquitted by a 10-2 jury vote. The bad publicity from this incident coupledwith her controversial autobiography "Ecstasy and Me" (purportedly ghostwritten and not approved by Ms. Lamarr) brought an end to her movie career.

On March 12, 1997, Hedy Lamarr was finally honoured by the Electronic FrontierFoundation for her great contribution to society. Her son Anthony Loderaccepted 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.The bulk of her nearly three million dollar estate was willed to her twochildren, but a portion was left to her former personal secretary and to afriend. Most surprisingly, however, was that she bequeathed $83,000 to a localpolice officer who had befriended her in the last years of her life. Lamarrasked that her ashes be scattered over the Vienna Woods, near where she wasborn in Austria.

In one of those weird twist-of-fates, that same son Anthony today owns a LosAngeles phone store in which half of the phone systems that he sells are basedon his mother's pioneering technology.

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