April 9, 2001

  • In my workplace, I have a couple of photos and articles on Hedy Lamarr (1915-2000) posted on the wall. Yes, my calendar girl she is!  After all, what guy wasn’t turned on by her pouty hot looks and simpleminded honesty?


     



     


    “Any girl can be glamorous.  All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."   -Hedy Lamarr


     


    Well, I for one.  Yes, she was very beautiful, but in a way that reminded me too much of my mom, so I always had to deal with an Oedipus shadow over that.  And her seemingly self-demeaning honesty was anything but self-demeaning.  Of all the sexy, glamorous, sultry starlets pressed during World War II into selling War Bonds for the Great Cause, she doubtlessly had the most personal justification to take offense to any insinuation that glamorous girls such as she were of necessity stupid and only suitable for selling bonds.  For Hedy was the “inventive mother” of the technology upon which many cellular phone transmissions, wireless internet, and wireless networking are now based: Spread Spectrum Transmission. 



     Quick non-silver screen facts:


     



    • Teenage “Trophy” in a parent-arranged marriage to Fritz Mandl, an Austrian munitions manufacturer.

    • Learned the ins-and-outs of munitions by hanging out a while with daddio during his business meetings.

    • Didn’t like Nazis so attempted to flee six-shooter hubby.

    • In her first attempt, fled into a nightclub/bordello, hid in a room, then a “customer” walked in and mistook her for a working girl.  With hubby banging on all the doors, she decided to work instead!  But eventually returned to daddy bang-bang.

    • In her second attempt, she drugged her guardian maid (daddy was being very cautious), crawled out through a window and made her way to London.

    • Always “interested in everything,” she wondered about the radio-control of torpedos she had learned about in Austria, with a mind to circumvent the jamming that kept the U.S. from using radio-controlled torpedos against the Nazis.

    • One day while playing the piano along with a friend and composer (George Antheil), she realized that he was hitting keys and she was hitting keys seemingly chaotically, but observed: “Hey, look, we’re talking to each other and we’re changing all the time.”

    • She had the insight into the piano rift session to realize that if a radio-controlled torpedo signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split second intervals, anyone listening and trying to jam it would only detect seemingly random noise and be unable to do so.

    • Obtained a “Secret Communications System” patent 8/11/42.

    • Although it took the invention of the transistor 20 years later to make her and Antheil’s concept practical, their patent is always cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology.

    • Finally honored and acknowledged for her (and Antheil’s) accomplishment in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Hedy responded: “It’s about time.”

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