# Hedy Lamarr: Movie star, inventor of WiFi



## Chopstick (Sep 28, 2013)

This is amazing.  I never knew this! 
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57390196/hedy-lamarr-movie-star-inventor-of-wifi/



> She possessed the kind of beauty that was haunting - an almost smoldering sensuality, with an exotic accent to match. She was once dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world."
> 
> Even her name - Hedy Lamarr - sounded dark and mysterious. But although she shared the screen with Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart, people rarely remember Hedy's talent.
> 
> Most remember only her face - a regret she carried with her to her grave.





> Her career took off. But the war in Europe was never far from her mind. And a chance dinner party with a Hollywood composer named George Antheil changed everything.
> 
> Like her, Antheil tinkered with ideas. He was famous for composing an avant-garde symphony using unconventional instruments, not the least of which were more than a dozen player pianos, all synchronized.
> 
> ...





> "Today, frequency hopping is used with the wireless phones that we have in our homes, GPS, most military communication systems - it's very widely used," said Rhodes.
> 
> But it was those building on her idea who got the credit. Hedy had quietly signed her patent over to the Navy, and left it at that. She gave the technology away, and never made a dime off of it.


----------



## Totentanz (Sep 28, 2013)

Cool story.    Although we've come a long way in the last two decades, a lot of the groundwork that was laid prior to 1960 is mindblowing.

(PS, I thought it was Hedley... )


----------



## Chopstick (Sep 28, 2013)

Let me clarify.
Hedy Lamarr:
 

Hedley Lamarr:


----------



## Red Flag 1 (Sep 28, 2013)

Chopstick said:


> Let me clarify.
> Hedy Lamarr:
> View attachment 9322
> 
> ...



You beat me to it.


----------



## TLDR20 (Sep 28, 2013)

I think the jump from frequency hopping to WIFI is pretty large. Like from here to the moon large.


----------



## Rabid Badger (Sep 29, 2013)

cback0220 said:


> I think the jump from frequency hopping to WIFI is pretty large. Like from here to the moon large.


wrong. The moon must be closer than you thought. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN



> http://digital-archaeology.org/the-secret-history-of-wifi/
> *In 1933, the most popular film was King Kong but the most talked about was Ecstasy, a Czechoslovakian film featuring the first on screen orgasm. Its leading lady went on to invent the technology that underpins WiFi.*
> Following her performance in Ekstase, Hedy Kiestler married arms dealer, Friedrich Mandl, the richest man in Austria. Mandl took his beautiful wife to business meetings to impress his clients, senior officials of the German and Italian fascist governments. A reoccurring subject of conversation was how to stop the enemy jamming the signal of radio-guided torpedoes. Whoever managed such a feat would control the seas. Jewish-born Hedy, with a secret love of science, quietly set her mind to coming up with the solution.
> In 1937, tired of her domineering husband, Hedy fled to Hollywood. She changed her name to Hedy Lamarr and forged a hugely successful acting career. Alongside Victor Mature, she was the star of the box office smash, Samson and Delilah.
> ...


----------



## Yoshi (Sep 29, 2013)

I just got that joke from Blazing Saddles...haha!


----------



## Chopstick (Sep 29, 2013)

@RB Those links are pretty cool.  Particularly this in the Scientific American:


> The technology, says Singer, was far ahead of its time. Although her ideas were at first ignored, the technology (which she and Antheil patented in 1942) was later used by the military—during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, for example—and more recently, it has been employed in wireless technologies like cell phones. It was eventually recognized in 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored Lamarr with a special Pioneer Award and she became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award.


----------



## AWP (Sep 29, 2013)

Others had already thought of the concept or even basic versions of freq.-hopping. What made Lamarr-Antheil's method most relevant to communications today is that it's patent was used as the basis for Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). Basically, if you've used any radio in the new JTIDs family, a SINGARS, Bluetooth, many cordless telephone types, and Wi-Fi (the 802.11 standard uses frequency hopping) among others, then you did so using technology developed in part by Ms. Lamarr. Like many great inventions today, one person didn't have a Eureka moment, many did, and still more pulled those moments together to make today's technology.

An important role? Yes? THE role? No, but that shouldn't diminish her contribution.


----------



## AWP (Sep 29, 2013)

One footnote to my post above:

http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture7/hedy/lemarr.htm



> When the war ended, Lamarr and Antheil put the invention behind them. It was not to be implemented in Antheil's lifetime.
> However, while seemingly inactive, the patent was not forgotten. Electronic technologies were beginning to develop, and in the 1950s, engineers from Sylvania Electronic Systems Division began to experiment with the ideas in the Secret Communication System patent, using *digital components in place of the paper rolls*. They developed an electronic spread-spectrum system that handled secure communications for the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. By then, the Secret Communications System patent had expired.
> It was in the early 1960s that the term "spread spectrum" began to be used. Today it refers to radio communications that employ cryptographic subsystems (like the pseudo-random patterns on the Secret Communications System's paper rolls), use a wide frequency spreading factor (much wider than typical voice telephone communications), and are not dependent on a particular type of tonality (such as a human voice) in the transmitting waveform.
> "*Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil were the first to satisfy all three ingredients*," says Price. Their spread-spectrum technique is today called "frequency hopping" because the transmission jumps from frequency to frequency.
> ...


----------

