Not sure this will increase the price of her posters...........but Ms. Lamarr's
intelligence and predisposition to invention makes for great reading. In a
few words, next time your negotiating down the price of a 3-Sheet on your
Bluetooth,
say thank you to Hedley I mean Hedy Lamarr!
TOPICS:WHAT TO READ, BOOKS, HEDY LAMARR, RICHARD RHODES, BIOGRAPHY
In the summer of 1940, George Antheil, an avant-garde composer trying to make
it in Hollywood, was invited to a dinner party at the request of the most
beautiful woman in the world. She, a movie star, wanted to talk to him about
her breasts: Did he think they could they be made any larger? She sought out
this improbable consultation on the authority of several articles Antheil had
written for Esquire magazine applying his supposed knowledge of endocrinology
to such questions as whether one’s wife had been unfaithful and “which girls
will and which girls won’t.”
Antheil was properly dazzled by the introduction. He later wrote that his
“eyeballs sizzled” upon meeting Hedy Lamarr and that she was even
better-looking in real life than on film. The question of the actress’ breasts
seems to have been dropped shortly thereafter, but the two did wind up
collaborating on an unlikely project meant to support the Allied war effort:
inventing a process by which remote-controlled torpedoes could evade
signal-jamming attempts by the enemy. This process, which was patented, is
essential to much of the wireless and cellular communications technology we use
today.
Richard Rhodes’ new book, “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions
of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” is the first
book-length attempt to rescue this odd and marvelous story from the dustbin of
history. Because the U.S. Navy at first declined to implement their patent and
then later revived it under still-undisclosed circumstances — apparently
without either Lamarr or Antheil knowing about it — the pair’s contribution has
been obscured. Antheil died in 1959, but Lamarr, who lived until 2000,
recognized her concept in later technological developments and sometimes
pointed it out.
Born Hedwig Eva Maria Keisler, to a family of assimilated Jews in Vienna,
Lamarr was the adored child of a father who loved to tell her how things
worked. She left school at the age of 16 to become an actress. (Her first
director decreed her “the most beautiful girl in the world,” a epithet later
picked up by Hollywood publicists.) At 19, she starred in a film “Ekstase”
(“Ecstasy”) that featured blurry shots of her swimming and running through the
woods in the nude, making herself mildly notorious. The same year, fatefully,
she married Friedrich “Fritz” Mandel, a rich, powerful and charismatic arms
manufacturer 13 years her senior.
Almost immediately, she realized her mistake. Controlling and jealous, Mandel
tried to buy and destroy every copy of “Ekstase” and forbade his trophy wife
from any further acting. Lamarr would later recall being “watched and guarded
and followed night and day.” She described her escape from the marriage and,
ultimately, to America, as just that, a flight in the dead of night from a
“beautiful, jeweled case.”
Before she left, however, Lamarr spent plenty of time soaking up the
conversation around her husband’s dinner table. His guests were fellow weapons
designers and manufacturers with right-wing connections, men who did not
realize just how much she understood. Lamarr’s famous, caustic advice to women
who wanted to be glamorous was to “stand still and look stupid,” and the same
trick surely came in handy when she wanted people to underestimate her.
Rhodes characterizes Lamarr as an “inventor,” rather than an engineer or
scientist. She set up a little workshop in her Hollywood home, and between
films she tinkered on an assortment of projects. Howard Hughes once sent over a
couple of chemists to help her with a scheme to concoct a dehydrated soft
drink. For her more martial ideas, she enlisted Antheil — who’d spent much of
the 1920s in Paris rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ezra Pound and Man Ray —
because he’d once worked as a weapons inspector in an armory. They also
collaborated on a method to detonate missiles that just miss their airborne
targets.
Antheil turned out to be a particularly fortuitous choice for the torpedo
guidance system because his most famous composition, “Ballet Mechanique,” not
only provoked a riot when it was first performed in 1925, but also featured 16
synchronized player pianos. Together, starting from Lamarr’s idea, they devised
a pre-digital way to synchronize a radio transmitter and a receiver so that
they can simultaneously switch from frequency to frequency while communicating
a message. Signals transmitted on a single frequency can be easily located and
jammed, but not a signal that is jumping randomly among, say, a few dozen
different frequencies. (This technique, which Lamarr dubbed “frequency
hopping,” is now subsumed within the broader term “spread spectrum.”)
The Navy buried the patent for various complex reasons, but Lamarr and
Antheil’s invention was eventually dusted off and employed in a variety of
military and civilian communications systems during the 1950s and onward. (If
you use Bluetooth devices, you use frequency hopping.) For a while, the actress
and the composer had more or less forgotten the patent, which expired in 1959.
Later, Lamarr would occasionally complain to the press, but it wasn’t until the
1990s that she found a champion in Dave Hughes, a longtime member of the online
community the Well (now owned by Salon). He brought her achievement to wider
awareness and, in 1997, she received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1986 book, “The Making of the Atomic
Bomb,” unites the social history of Vienna, the classic era of Hollywood film,
Paris in the ’20s, experimental music, weapons design, the niceties of patent
law and the technology of information transmission — a real grab bag of
elements — in this short, charming and remarkably seamless book. He makes a
rigorous effort to establish exactly what Lamarr contributed, rescuing the
truth from both belittlers (Antheil himself vacillated between giving her
credit and making patronizing remarks about the notions in her “beautiful,
beringleted head”) and Hedyolators.
Rhodes titled the book “Hedy’s Folly” in part because her contemporaries
regarded Lamarr’s inventing as entirely superfluous to her career as a star and
in part because she dared to believe that her creation would be welcomed by the
Navy. It was an institution, as Rhodes puts it, unlikely to be “prepared to
take correction from a Hollywood actress … in a matter about which it was not
prepared to listen to its own submarine commanders.” In the end, she used her
fame to raise millions of dollars for war bonds instead. “She deserved better,”
Rhodes writes, than to be judged by that spectacular face alone, and now, at
last, she is.
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