The woman who was to become world famous under her stage name Hedy Lamarr was remarkable in more ways than one.. Born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler into a Jewish family of wealth in the last throws of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914 she grew to become an astonishingly beautiful young woman and was discovered as an actress in her early teens. At that time she moved to Berlin to pursue a world-wide career in silent movies. But at the same time, she was also an inventor who developed and patented a technology called frequency-hopping spread-spectrum which you are most probably using in one way or other every day of your life. In fact, you are probably using it as you read this.
Lamarr gained some immediate notoriety when starring in the German silent movie “Extase” in 1933 where she not only was briefly shown in the nude, but also displayed her face during orgasm much to the dismay of the good people of the world at the time.
The same year the movie came out, she married an Austrian arms dealer and war profiteer, who was said to be the third richest man in Austria at the time. He was rather upset by his young wife’s orgasmic performance and tried to buy every single copy of the movie available.
The marriage did not last. Two reasons can be attriuted to their short-lived matrimony. First, her husband Fritz Mandl was known to be somewhat of a ''control queen.'' Additionally, despite his own Jewish root, he had strong ties to the growing fascist government in Italy and Germany. Lamarr told stories of him hosting lavish events with both Mussolini and Hitler in attendance.
At some point she decided to leave the marriage in what she best describes as an escape, which led her to Hollywood via Paris in 1937.
Lamarr had dabbled at being an inventor throughout her life. She had invented a soda drink in the form of a tablet that could be added to water. Unfortunately it tasted like sugared Alka Seltzer, which it probably was. She also suggested improvements to the Kleenex box and the traffic light, though neither invention went very far. Her fifteen minutes of fame as an inventor were yet to come.
While she had detested her arms dealing ex-husband’s political views and controlling ways, she did spend hours musing over his ideas for top-secret weapons. For hours on-end and in the early forties she had become increasingly tired of Hollywood. Its ways became increasingly bizarre to her at times of so much struggle, suffering, and oppression in Europe.
With World War II turning Europe into rubble, and the terrible revelation of The Holocaust unraveling, she wanted to turn her technical genius towards helping defeat Hitler. At a dinner party she met Hollywood composer George Antheil who like her, loved challenging established ways in order to come up with something better.
Antheil was a composer of remarkable symphonies like is Ballett Mechaique that provided the soundtrack to the 1924 Cubist Dadaist film by the same name. Antheil was always taken by using strange instruments; amongst them a series of mechanical pianos all synchronized to play together. Those mechanical pianos used long rolls that had holes punched into them to encode music.
Lamarr remembered her ex-husband’s shady work on torpedoes and their relatively high miss rate. Radio control had been suggested as a solution before, but the enemy could easily jam any radio control that would use a given frequency. Worse yet, a remote-controlled torpedo could even be hi-jacked. When talking about this problem, In their
joint proposal to the US Navy, Lamarr suggested not using one frequency but many to guide the explosive payload to an enemy ship, and devised a method to hop between the frequencies in sequences unknown to the enemy thus making jamming impossible. Anheil pitched in with his mechanical piano knowledge and suggested a similar mechanism could be used to jump from frequency to frequency just as a piano jumps from note to note.
On August 11th 1942, U.S. 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, though novel, soon met with opposition from the U.S. Navy and was not adopted.
Lamarr was dismissed as people apparently struggled with the possibility that both exterior beauty and intellectual genius could co-exist in the same human life form.
Lamarr was instead encouraged to use her popularity and fame to help sell war bonds rather then help with military technology. Intent on helping to defeat the Germans, she did so, and managed to raise the incredibly high amount of $7,000,000 dollars in one single fundraiser event.
Patent #2,292,387 expired without being exploited and it was not until 1962 when it was used by US military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. Anheil never lived to see the use of his ideas, as he had already died in 1959. One might never imagine that mechanical pianos would play a role in cutting Fidel Castro off from foreign supplies, but it was indeed the invention of Lamarr and Antheil that laid the foundation for this important piece of technology. Lamarr's work was honored in 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her a belated award for her contributions.
So how might you be using Lamarr's invention if you are most probably not operating a torpedo or guided missile as we speak? Well In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN Inc., acquired a 49% claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock. Hedy Lamarr died in Florida in 2000 at the age of 85 and lived to enjoy the benefits of her brain-child.
Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea today serves as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as GPS, Bluetooth, COFDM as is used in Wi-Fi network connections, and CDMA that some cordless and cell phones use. So whether you are reading this article on your mobile phone or your wifi enabled computer, it somehow links back to mechanical pianos, torpedos and the woman who stood model for Snow White. We at Kvart & BØLGE are definitely indebted to her as most of the music played on our affordable audiophile loudspeakers will in some way or other have been transmitted using her ideas.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
