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The Invention
They wanted her face not her brains.
1940: Janet Gaynor throws a dinner party
Hollywood beauty Hedy Lamarr makes small talk with the enfant terrible of film music composition George Antheil. The next day they get together again. She has finally found someone she can discuss her idea of frequency hopping with. What follows is not a love affair but an intense exchange about radio controlled torpedoes. One can assume that the subject came up over a political discussion about Nazi Germany. Hedy Lamarr came from a Jewish family and was exposed, no doubt, to quite a bit of information about weapons and defense from the time she was married to the munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Her idea focused above all on the radio guidance of torpedoes and ultimately on preventing the enemy from understanding the radio signals. Her idea was in fact quite simple, like all great ideas – if it was possible to intercept a frequency, why not use the switching of frequencies in rapid succession to encode transmission – so-called frequency hopping?
Antheil had been fooling around at the grand piano; Lamarr was leaning against the instrument singing along while Antheil kept switching keys, and this was when the inspiration for the implementation of the idea struck her – why not use player piano rolls to control the radio tuners.
My God, I can see them saying, “We shall put a player piano in a torpedo.” -- George Antheil
Lamarr and Antheil, as they will tell the story later, stretch out on the living room rug and put their ideas onto paper. Piano rolls for the code input and the same for deciphering the code. Radio signals that switch their frequency quickly could only be deciphered by their recipient in this way. An invention which has become the cornerstone for secure wireless information transmission.
Lamarr and Antheil had wanted to support their country during the war; they worked out their idea and submitted it to the patent office. They received a patent in 1942. Hedy Lamarr, under her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey, was awarded patent #2,292,387, along with co-inventor George Antheil, for a “Secret Communication System.” This seminal invention was the first instance of spread-spectrum communications based on frequency-hopping techniques. [August 11, 1942]
The Navy declared the patent unfeasible and piano rolls cumbersome
Hedy Lamarr wants to work with the National Inventors Council on a regular basis. She is advised not to forfeit her brilliant film career and is convinced instead to sell kisses for war bonds. With a price of $50,000 for a single kiss she has soon sold millions of dollars worth of bonds.
Spread Spectrum Utilizations – Where the Lamarr and Antheil invention is being used:
GPS
CDMA
Blue Tooth
Wireless Internet
Cordless phones
Milstar Defense Satellite
They never earn a penny on the patent. After it expired (17 years later) the US government reevaluated the idea and developed it further. |
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