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Hi-Fi History: The Arguably Best Looking Inventor of all Times: Hedy Lamarr
October 2, 2015
Arved Deecke

SyrianRefugeesGetTogetherin
GermanytoFoundaFullBlown
SymphonyOrchestra.
September17,2015

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Hi-Fi History: The
Arguably Best
Looking Inventor of
all Times: Hedy
Lamarr

The woman who was to become world famous under her stage name Hedy Lamarr was remarkable
in more ways than one.. Born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler into a Jewish family of wealth in the last
throws of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914 she grew to become an astonishingly beautiful young
woman and was discovered as an actress in her early teens. At that time she moved to Berlin to
pursue a world-wide career in silent movies. But at the same time, she was also an inventor who
developed and patented a technology called frequency-hopping spread-spectrum which you are
most probably using in one way or other every day of your life. In fact, you are probably using it as
you read this.

Lamarr gained some immediate notoriety when starring in the German silent movie Extase in 1933
where she not only was briefly shown in the nude, but also displayed her face during orgasm much
to the dismay of the good people of the world at the time.

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The same year the movie came out, she married an Austrian arms dealer and war profiteer, who was
said to be the third richest man in Austria at the time. He was rather upset by his young wifes
orgasmic performance and tried to buy every single copy of the movie available.

The marriage did not last. Two reasons can be attriuted to their short-lived matrimony. First, her
husband Fritz Mandl was known to be somewhat of a ''control queen.'' Additionally, despite his own
Jewish root, he had strong ties to the growing fascist government in Italy and Germany. Lamarr told
stories of him hosting lavish events with both Mussolini and Hitler in attendance.

At some point she decided to leave the marriage in what she best describes as an escape, which
led her to Hollywood via Paris in 1937.

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Lamarr had dabbled at being an inventor
throughout her life. She had invented a soda
drink in the form of a tablet that could be
added to water. Unfortunately it tasted like
sugared Alka Seltzer, which it probably was.
She also suggested improvements to the
Kleenex box and the traffic light, though
neither invention went very far. Her fifteen
minutes of fame as an inventor were yet to
come.

While she had detested her arms dealing

ex-husbands political views and controlling ways, she did spend hours musing over his ideas for
top-secret weapons. For hours on-end and in the early forties she had become increasingly tired of
Hollywood. Its ways became increasingly bizarre to her at times of so much struggle, suffering, and
oppression in Europe.

With World War II turning Europe into rubble, and the terrible revelation of The Holocaust unraveling,
she wanted to turn her technical genius towards helping defeat Hitler. At a dinner party she met
Hollywood composer George Antheil who like her, loved challenging established ways in order to
come up with something better.

Antheil was a composer of remarkable symphonies like is Ballett

Mechaique that provided the soundtrack to the 1924 Cubist Dadaist
film by the same name. Antheil was always taken by using strange
instruments; amongst them a series of mechanical pianos all
synchronized to play together. Those mechanical pianos used long
rolls that had holes punched into them to encode music.

Lamarr remembered her ex-husbands shady work on torpedoes and

their relatively high miss rate. Radio control had been suggested as a
solution before, but the enemy could easily jam any radio control that
would use a given frequency. Worse yet, a remote-controlled
torpedo could even be hi-jacked. When talking about this problem, In
their

joint proposal to the US Navy, Lamarr suggested not using one

frequency but many to guide the explosive payload to an enemy
ship, and devised a method to hop between the frequencies in
sequences unknown to the enemy thus making jamming
impossible. Anheil pitched in with his mechanical piano
knowledge and suggested a similar mechanism could be used
to jump from frequency to frequency just as a piano jumps from
note to note.
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On August 11th 1942, U.S. Patent #2,292,387

was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler
Markey", Lamarr's married name at the time. This
We'resorry,thiscontentcannotbe
early version of frequency hopping, though novel,
displayed.Pleasetryagainlater.
soon met with opposition from the U.S. Navy and

2015
by KVART & BLGE Inc. New York, Denmark, Mexico.
was not adopted.

Lamarr was dismissed as people apparently

struggled with the possibility that exterior beauty
could intellectual genius could both exist in the
same human life form.

Lamarr was instead encouraged to use her

popularity and fame to help sell war bonds rather
then help with military technology. Intent on
helping to defeat the Germans, she did so, and
managed to raise the incredibly high amount of
$7,000,000 dollars in one single fundraiser event.

Patent #2,292,387 expired without being

exploited and it was not until 1962 when it was
used by US military ships during a blockade of
Cuba after the patent had expired. Anheil never
lived to see the use of his ideas, as he had
already died in 1959. One might never imagine that mechanical pianos would play a role in cutting
Fidel Castro off from foreign supplies, but it was indeed the invention of Lamarr and Antheil that laid
the foundation for this important piece of technology. Lamarr's work was honored in 1997, when the
Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her a belated award for her contributions.

So how might you be using Lamarr's invention if you are most probably not operating a torpedo or
guided missile as we speak? Well In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN Inc.,
acquired a 49% claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock. Hedy Lamarr
died in Florida in 2000 at the age of 85 and lived to enjoy the benefits of her brain-child.

Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea today serves as the basis for modern spreadspectrum communication technology, such as GPS, Bluetooth, COFDM as is used in Wi-Fi network
connections, and CDMA that some cordless and cell phones use. So whether you are reading this
article on your mobile phone or your wifi enabled computer, it somehow links back to mechanical
pianos, torpedos and the woman who stood model

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for Snow White.

Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican

Loudspeaker company KVART & BLGE that makes
audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound
systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time
heblogsabout all things related to sound, music and audio.

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