B l u e t o o t h N e w s . c o m   

The Hedy Lamarr Story

By: David Shier

If Hedy Lamarr was right about this, then she was also proof that looks can be deceiving.

If you don't know her story, then you are probably wondering why you are reading an article about an early film star in a magazine dedicated to wireless networks. Well, read on and it will all become clear.

Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna on November 9, 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. The daughter of a banker, Hedy was an aspiring actress starting in her teens. In 1933, at the age of 18, she achieved a certain infamy when she briefly appeared nude in a couple of scenes a Czech film “Ecstasy.” The film, the first to contain nudity (other than the short stag films that appeared almost as soon as motion pictures were invented,) was banned in many countries around the world, including the United States.

A few months after the filming of “Ecstasy” Hedy's parents arranged a marriage to a rich Austrian arms dealer, Fritz Mandl.

Life as Mrs. Mandl

Fritz Mandl was not a very good husband, or even a good man in general. As head of the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik weapons manufacturing company he was dealing directly with some of the most despicable characters in Europe, including Hitler and Mussolini. The re-arming of Germany, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, was a very profitable business for Fritz. To keep his clients and suppliers happy, he would entertain them with lavish dinner parties at his estate, and of course, he was happy to show off his beautiful young wife. While Hedy Mandl received the perks of being a member of the social elite of Vienna, she was not content to just be the “show piece” of her domineering husband. Hedy was smart and ambitious. She wanted to continue her acting carrier, but not only would Fritz not allow that, he was so possessive of her that he would not allow her out alone. He did have her play hostess at his dinner meetings, where she listened to munitions manufacturers and buyers discussing various issues. What she heard set the stage for her contribution to electronic commutations and eventually Bluetooth. But lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

Hedy eventually concluded that, despite the wealth, her life with Mandl was simply unbearable. She tried to leave him once when they were visiting Paris, only to be dragged back. So she tried again. This time, she drugged her maid (who was being paid to guard her) and escaped out a servant's entrance dressed as a maid.

After receiving a quick divorce, Hedy moved to London. But she was constantly worried that Mandl would capture her again, so in order to get as far away from him as possible, as well as to pursue her acting career, Hedy boarded a ship to the USA and ultimately Hollywood.

On the ship, as Hedy Kiesler again, she met Louis B. Mayer (the studio executive who's name is immortalized in the MGM logo.) Mayer signed her to a contract. But before Mayer would agree to make her a star, he insisted that she change her name to avoid the controversy of her appearance in Ecstasy. Given a list of possible names, she selected Lamarr (appropriately: the sea) after the famous silent film star Barbara La Mar.

In Hollywood, as in Austria, Hedy was part of the social elite - attending parties with the other rich and famous of the entertainment business. It was at one of these parties that our story (finally) takes its turn to the subject of technology.

Collaboration with George Antheil

George Antheil was an eccentric composer who's work included Ballet Mechanique, which required sixteen player pianos and other mechanized instruments to play in perfect synchronized fashion. It was this background that was the basis for the technical teamwork between the actress and the musician.

War was already raging in Europe and the battles at sea were not going well for the allies. Lamarr remembered some of the meetings she witnessed as Mandl's wife where the discussions focused on the difficulty of guiding torpedoes. At the time, torpedoes were either simply aimed and let go, or used magnetic guidance. Due to shifting currents, or evasive maneuvers by the enemy, most missed their targets, and the current solution was to use more torpedoes. While this was obviously not a problem for Mandl, who sold them, it was a problem for the resource strapped countries that were firing them at each other's ships. One of the possible solutions discussed in Hedy's presence was to use radio to guide the torpedoes. However, the problem with radio was that it was easy for the enemy to jam, or even worse: redirect the torpedo back to the ship that fired it!

Hedy thought about this problem and felt that if the problems of radio guidance could be solved, the resulting improvement in the accuracy of torpedoes could be a decisive advantage in the war. Then at the party with Antheil, she was sitting at the piano, singing along while George kept switching keys. Suddenly she realized that if the radio on the ship and the radio in a torpedo could keep switching frequencies in sync with each other, it would be impossible for an enemy to jam unless they knew the pattern.

After discussing her idea with Antheil, they agreed to get together to work out the details, which they did at her home in the Hollywood Hills. Using George's experience with synchronizing player pianos, they came up with a scheme that controlled the radio tuners with paper tapes, similar to the rolls used in player pianos.

After months of work, they submitted their idea to the “National Inventor's Council”, a program established by the US War Department to allow citizens to submit inventions to help the war effort. While most of the ideas the Council received were of little value, this idea of radio “frequency hopping” got the attention of Council Chairman and powerful General Motors executive, Charles Kettering.

Kettering was able to get Government resources assigned to help improve the concept and finally, in August 1942 Patent 2,292,387 for the "Secret Communication System" was issued. Because Hedy pursued this effort as her way of trying to help the Alies defeat Hitler (someone she knew and feared from personal experience), she was not after any fame or fortune (both of which she had anyway) from her invention. So the patient was not issued using her familiar stage name of Lamarr, but rather her current married name Hedy Kiesler Markey.

Unfortunately, the invention was a little ahead of its time. While the very clever idea of having transmitting and receiving radios switching frequencies rapidly was an excellent method for securing transmissions, Antheil's mechanical method to implement it was considered too fragile for shipboard use. So it was never used for this purpose.

Also, from the perspective of today’s autonomous weapons, capable of hitting sub-meter targets using split-second computer controls and satellite guidance, the invention seems rather quaint. It indicated that the “false signals” (noted in the box above) would be timed by the operator watching a lamp controlled by the extra bit on the tape. This implies that the timing of the frequency shifts was extremely slow – which makes sense given the mechanical design.

Technology Reborn

While the patent was never used during the war, it didn't die completely. Soon after the patent expired, the technology was reevaluated. Replacing the mechanical devices with the newly practical solid-state transistors, and speeding up the hopping frequency, the idea was fitted to voice transmission radios. The first implementation of frequency hopping was used to secure ship-to-ship communications during the blockade of Cuba in what has become known as “The Cuban Missile Crisis”.

Sadly, George Antheil died Feb. 12, 1959, before their patent was implemented, and in any case, since the patent expired before it was commercially used, neither he, nor Lamarr, would have seen any money from it. Not only that, but for many years, the use of frequency hopping technology was a closely guarded military secret.

Frequency Hopping in Modern Electronics

Today, frequency hopping, and its more complex sibling: direct sequence spread spectrum, are no longer classified government secrets, but common elements of modern electronic communications. Frequency hopping provides a number of advantages for Bluetooth. Of course there is the data security feature that was the purpose behind Lamarr and Antheil’s original invention. Related to this is the added reliability due to being immune to interference from other transmissions on a single frequency. Conversely, the use of frequency hopping also reduces the potential for Bluetooth transmissions to interfere with other transmissions using the same radio spectrum.

More then half a century after the patent was issued Hedy Lamarr was finally honored, not for being the glamorous actress that everyone thought they knew, but for being the intelligent inventor of a technology that is key to numerous wireless communications systems today. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented the award in 1997, Lamarr had been retired to a very private life and had not appeared in public for more than twenty years. Her son accepted the award in her name and played a tape recording she made for those present.

The belated award was fortunately timed. Hedy Lamarr died January 19, 2000. Had it not been for the publicity generated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation recognition, her contribution to technology would have disappeared into obscurity. The irony is that, while people will associate Lamarr with her performance in Samson and Delilah, far more people than saw even a single one of her films have used the cellular and portable phones, military radios, security systems, and now Bluetooth devices utilizing designs that are a legacy of her invention.