>
>great Story Judi Hedy was one of my faves and I think one the most
photogentic
actresses.. I haventseen many ofher films. that is so cool you had
time to talk to her... wowow... I love storys like that..
The inventions sounded great.
>
>---- Original Message ----
>From: [email protected]
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: [MOPO] Hedy Lamarr NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE
>Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:17:19 -0500
>
>>
>>You're absolutely right! My sister-in-law was a good friend of
>Hedy's and was the executor of her estate. One Christmas holiday
>season, I was visiting my brother and sister-in-law and so was Hedy.
>As the others went out to finish last-minute Christmas shopping, Hedy
>and I poured some wine and had cheese and crackers by the fireplace.
>She told me some fascinating stories including the one about this
>invention. She worked with a couple of other scientists on some
>other inventions but they never went very far. She definitely was
>more than "just a pretty face". And the stories about her movie
>co-stars.......WOW!!!!
>>
>> Judi
>>
>>Judith Weaver
>>
>>1457 Guava Avenue
>>
>>Melbourne, FL 32935
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:58:48 -0800
>>From: [email protected]
>>Subject: [MOPO] Hedy Lamarr NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE
>>To: [email protected]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>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 ones wife had been unfaithful and which girls
>will and which girls wont.
>>
>>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, Hedys 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 pairs 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 husbands dinner table. His guests were
>fellow weapons designers and manufacturers with right-wing
>connections, men who did not realize just how much she understood.
>Lamarrs 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 whod spent much of the 1920s in Paris
>rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ezra Pound and Man Ray because
>hed 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 Lamarrs 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 Antheils 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 wasnt 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 Hedys Folly in part because her
>contemporaries regarded Lamarrs 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.Visit the MoPo
>Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
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