Hedy Lamarr: Movie star, inventor of WiFi

[Chopstick]

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.

And that gave the two of them an idea: If pianos could be synchronized to hop from one note to another, why couldn't radio signals - steering a torpedo - hop as well? Their inventive partnership was born.

"Hedy's idea was if you could make both the transmitter and the receiver simultaneously jump from frequency to frequency, then someone trying to jam the signal wouldn't know where it was," said Rhodes.

"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]

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]

Let me clarify.
Hedy Lamarr:


Hedley Lamarr:

 

[Red Flag 1]

Let me clarify.
Hedy Lamarr:
View attachment 9322

Hedley Lamarr:
View attachment 9323

You beat me to it.

 

[TLDR20]

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

 

[Rabid Badger]

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.
During this period she visited eccentric composer, George Antheil, for advice about improving her figure. Somehow, torpedoes came up. Hedy told him about her idea for a radio signal that constantly hopped frequencies. Antheil suggested a hole-punched ribbon, similar to the paper roll in a player piano, might be the missing part of the puzzle. A year later, in 1941, they registered a patent for a ‘secret communication system‘.

Thirty years later, in 1971, at the University of Hawaii, a computer network was created based on this technology. Called ALOHANET, it used radio signals to connect computers across the Hawaiian Islands. A dedicated radio frequency would mean only one message could be sent at once. By spreading the signal across the spectrum, several computers could communicate simultaneously without interfering with each other. It was the world’s first wireless network.
Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea remains the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology. So, the next time you make a call, use Bluetooth or a WiFi network, say a quiet thank you to a Austrian actress with a body for Hollywood and a head for numbers. No wonder she had six husbands.

 

[Yoshi]

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

 

[Chopstick]

@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]

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]

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.
Initially, spread spectrum remained a military communications technology, and even today "the Defense Department of the United States has a huge investment in spread spectrum of a frequency-hopping type now, just like Hedy Lamarr's, which protects our assets all over the world," notes Price.
In the mid-1980s, the US military declassified spread-spectrum technology, and the commercial sector began to develop it for consumer electronics. Today, it's an increasingly important component of mobile telephony. CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology uses spread spectrum. Spread spectrum has proven highly useful in cellular telephones, because its inherent encryption guarantees better privacy for cellular phone users. The technology has also proven to be an extremely efficient method for using radio waves. Rather than requiring each transmission to use its own frequency, spread spectrum enables people to simultaneously communicate over the same bands of spectrum without appreciable interference. Thus, as more people buy cellular phones, the increasing demand for spectrum can be accommodated by sharing the same frequencies.