Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr

Beauty with brain!

Who was Hedy Lamarr?

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo, society has long ignored her inventive genius.

Her unfortunate marriage

Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy. Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived. She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” She was miserable, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took the knowledge gained from a dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry.

How was her life like?

Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria, on November 9th, 1914, into a well-to-do Jewish family. An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He taught her about machines and how they work; he was the reason for her early geniuses. Meanwhile, Lamarr's mother was a pianist and placed her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age. Lamarr's brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty in the film industry took center stage.

Moving to London

While in London, Lamarr’s luck took a turn when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, of the famed MGM Studios. With this meeting, she secured her ticket to Hollywood where she mystified American audiences with her grace, beauty, and accent. In Hollywood, Lamarr was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes. Lamarr dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes.

Lamarr and Hughes

Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

Lamarr and Antheil

Together, Lamarr and Antheil invented a new communication system that was meant to guide torpedoes to their targets using frequency hopping technology. Essentially (and please bear with my explanation—I’m a history major) this system sends a signal that hops across frequencies on radio waves, both with the transmitter and the receiver, and this prevents the interception of the signal across radio waves by the enemy, allowing the torpedo to reach its target. Lamarr and Antheil were able to patent their technology under U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942. Unfortunately, the Navy did not end up using Lamarr and Antheil’s technology because it was “too cumbersome,” but in the mid-1950s, the Navy shared their concept with a contractor tasked with creating a “sonobuoy” to detect submarines. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, all US ships that formed the blockade around Cuba were armed with torpedoes that were guided by a ‘frequency hopping’ system. Frequency hopping alone, as an idea, is said to be worth at least $30 billion, but the patent expired without Lamarr seeing a cent. After the rejection from the US Navy, Lamarr focused on supporting the war effort using her celebrity status to her advantage; she traveled around the US selling war bonds and was able to sell millions of dollars’ worth of them.

Recognition

Lamarr wasn’t recognized for her invention until 1997, when she and Antheil were jointly awarded the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lamarr was also the first woman to win the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014 for the development of frequency hopping technology. Lamarr and Antheil’s invention made it possible for scientists and engineers to later develop technologies we use every single day—Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, cordless phones, and cell phones. Any tech that uses “spread spectrum technology” (a broad terms for wireless communication that uses variable signals by hopping from one frequency to another if the signal fails) has its roots in Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency hopping technology. It’s the reason more users are able to communicate simultaneously with little interference.

“Descifrando el código de Hedy”

1. El sistema de comunicación de Hedy utilizaba 88 frecuencias. Si el número de frecuencias es el doble de un número más 12, plantea y resuelve la ecuación: 2. En una prueba del invento, el tiempo total de transmisión fue de 30 segundos. Si cada salto de frecuencia dura (x) segundos y se realizan 6 saltos:

3. La mejora de la señal viene dada por la expresión:x^2 - 9x + 20 = 0

• Resuelve la ecuación
• ¿Cuántas soluciones tiene?
• ¿Cuál de ellas tendría sentido en un contexto real? ¿Por qué?

4. Reto final El alcance de una señal experimental se modeliza con: x^2 = 64

• Resuelve la ecuación.
• Explica por qué una de las soluciones no es válida en este contexto.