(11-08-2011 11:39 )skully Wrote: 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a frequency hopping, spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.
The life and career of Hedy Lamarr is beyond the realms of fiction. She was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, the only child of Jewish parents. Despite her Jewish background in the 1930's she attended functions where she met both Hitler and Mussolini, but she had to rescue her mother and get her out of Austria at the outbreak of WW2 (her father had already died of natural causes).
In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý's notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face during orgasm in one scene (rumored to be unsimulated), and full frontal shots of her in another scene, swimming and running nude through the woods, gave the film great notoriety.
Not long afterwards, she met and married Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer and technical expert who expected her to be a traditional wife and give up her movie career. She eventually fled the relationship, even hiding from Mendl in a brothel for a while, but her time with him had a strange spin off, as he had been an expert in physics and early electronics, and although Lamarr had no formal scientific education she found she had a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics and clearly picked up a lot of knowledge from him.
It was from this that the idea of a frequency hopping, spread spectrum communication system came about. Avant garde composer George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mécanique, originally written for Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously but in one of those "eureka" moments, realised that it could have military applications as a guidance system.
Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942, US Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey", Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. Although a presentation of the technique was soon made to the U.S. Navy, it met with opposition and was not adopted
Despite Antheil's lobbying, the Navy turned its back on the invention, concluding that the mechanism would have been too bulky to fit into a torpedo. Antheil disagreed; he insisted that it could be made small enough to squeeze into a watch. And he thought he knew why the Navy was so negative: "In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubted, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words 'player piano. 'My god,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player piano in a torpedo.'"
But Antheil's explanation was too simple; the invention had other problems. Describing them requires looking at other developments in torpedo control at the time, especially in Germany.
In the United States Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil, shunned by the Navy, no longer pursued their invention. But in 1957, the concept was taken up by engineers at the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division, in Buffalo, New York. Their arrangement, using, of course, electronics rather than piano rolls, ultimately became a basic tool for secure military communications. It was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962, about three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent had expired. Subsequent patents in frequency changing, which are generally unrelated to torpedo control, have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal anti-jamming device used today, for example, in the U.S. government's Milstar defense communication satellite system.
Lamarr starred in 35 films in total, but her film career was very much what might have been. She was regarded as a poor judge of scripts, and ruled herself out of "Casablanca" when she was asked to test for the role that went to Ingrid Bergman. She enjoyed her biggest success as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah", the highest-grossing film of 1949, with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman, but she never won as Oscar - again, her best chance was a "might have been" when she refused to accept second billing behind Charles Boyer in "Gaslight". Again, the role went to Ingrid Bergman who "didn't give a damn" about billing and walked off with the Academy Award.
However, following her comedic turn opposite Bob Hope in My Favorite Spy (1951), her career went into decline. She appeared only sporadically in films after 1950, one of her last roles being that of Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic The Story of Mankind (1957).
She was six times married, had three children, six times divorced, two further broken engagements, rumours of numerous affairs and was twice arrested for shoplifting in 1965 and 1991 (the latter for stealing laxatives). The 1965 arrest and ensuing publicity scuppered an attempted movie comeback as she was dropped in favour of Zsa Zsa Gabor in "Picture Mommy Dead".
In her autobiography published in 1966 she contemplated on how she had earned as estimated $30 million, yet one day "didn't have enough money to buy a sandwich".
After that she retired from public life and lived quietly in retirement in Florida, where she died in 2000 aged 86.
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