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EVE WORLD: WOMEN OF GREATNESS The Glamorous Actress and Hollywood 1940 Screen Goddess, Hedy Lamarr invented the Spread Spectrum: Torpedoes Guiding and Anti-Guiding Communication System Who would have guessed that a glamorous movie goddess of the 1940's would create a communications system that was decades ahead of its time and is only now coming into widespread use?
His wife clearly learned things from him, because she and her co-inventor, George Antheil, later went on to invent the torpedo guidance system that was two decades before its time. Hedy Lamarr's co-inventor, George Antheil, was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900. His parents were from East Prussia. After studying music at what is now the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, he went to Europe to pursue a career as a concert pianist, heading first to Berlin and then settling in Paris in 1923. He became one of the top avante-garde composers of the time, writing and playing machinelike, "mechanistic," rhythmically propulsive pieces with names like Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Jazz Sonata, and Death of Machines. His Ballet Méanique was scored for sixteen player pianos, xylophones and percussion and was first performed in Paris in June 1926, in a version that had only one player piano but also had electric bells, airplane propellers and a siren. It caused an uproar. Antheil knew practically everybody in Paris's literary, artistic and musical circles, but in 1933 he returned permanently to the United States. He became one of the top avante-garde composers of the time, writing and playing machinelike, "mechanistic," rhythmically propulsive pieces with names like Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Jazz Sonata, and Death of Machines.
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His Ballet Méanique was scored for sixteen player pianos, xylophones and percussion and was first performed in Paris in June 1926, in a version that had only one player piano but also had electric bells, airplane propellers and a siren. It caused an uproar. Antheil knew practically everybody in Paris's literary, artistic and musical circles, but in 1933 he returned permanently to the United States. He became a film composer in Hollywood and a writer for Esquire magazine, producing a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and articles about romance and endocrinology. He even published a book titled Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology. In 1939 he set an article to Esquire about the future of Europe that proved impressively accurate: It predicted that the war would start with Germany invading Poland, that Germany would later attack Russia, and then the United States would be drawn into the conflict.
The analogy was complete in his mind: By the time the two applied for a patent on a "Secret Communication System," on June 10, 1941, the invention used slotted paper rolls similar to player-piano rolls to synchronize the frequency changes in transmitter and receiver, and it even called for exactly eighty-eight frequencies, the number of keys on a piano. Lamarr and Antheil worked on the idea for several months and then, in December 1940, sent a description of it to the National Inventors Council, which had been launched with much fanfare earlier in the year as a gatherer of novel ideas and inventions from the general public. CONTINUES ON P33 |
Hedy
Lamarr was born in Vienna in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She
went to Max Reinhardt's famous acting school in Berlin during her late
teens, and in 1933 she showed the world her acting skills and most of
herself in the film Extase (Ecstacy), which quickly
became notorious for its extensive nude scenes. The movie played in
America after severe cutting, and in 1937 its leading lady went to
Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer, of MGM, hired her and gave her the name
Lamarr. Some people thought Hedy to be the most beautiful woman in
Hollywood, but as an actress she was overshadowed by heroines like
Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn. In 1966, she published her
autobiography, Ecstacy and Me. Hedy Lamarr married Fritz Mandal,
the first of six husbands, in 1933. During their marriage, which broke
up in 1937, Madame Mandl was an institution in Viennese society,
entertaining—and dazzling—foreign leaders, including Hitler and
Mussolini. Her husband specialized in shells and grenades, but from
the mid-thirties on he also manufactured military aircraft. He was
interested in control systems and conducted research in the field.
He
met Hedy Lamar in the summer of 1940, when they were neighbors in
Hollywood and she approached him with a question about glands: She wanted
to know how she could enlarge her breasts. In time the conversation came
around to weapons, and Lamarr told Antheil that she was contemplating
quitting MGM and moving to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the
newly established National Inventors Council. They began talking about
radio control for torpedoes. The idea itself was not new, but her concept
of "
A page of drawings from Lamarr
and Antheil's patent. Note the player-piano-like.