Hello
everyone! I'm sorry to be late again, but I write better when I'm
feeling inspired and that took some time today. I returned to the
article I found Khutulun in yesterday and found something I never
knew. Hedy Lamarr, a starlet of the Golden Age of Hollywood, was an
inventor as well! I notice reading about actresses from those times
that they had extremely interesting lives and it makes me a bit
jealous.
Hedy
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to Jewish parents in
Austria, was quite an amazing woman! At the young age of eighteen she
appeared in a movie called Ecstasy, where she was naked and pretended
to have an orgasm on stage. This first role brought a lot of
attention and controversy to the young lady.
Although
she was Jewish, she married a Nazi arms dealer. He wanted the most
famous woman in the country and he had her for a time. Her husband
kept her prisoner in her own home and she finally fled. She drugged
the maid and took her uniform to escape the man's overbearing
presence and she fled to America.
Hedy's
debut in Hollywood was in Algiers in 1938. A year later, she wanted
to enlarge her breasts naturally with hormones and she was introduced
to amateur endocrinologist George Antheil. The two meeting and
singing a duet led to a scientific breakthrough. Mr. Antheil was very
well known for being impressive at playing pianola or player pianos
and kept changing key. Hedy had to vocally keep up with this.
That's
when Hedy told George about the idea she just had that if they had a
roll like the pianos did but for jamming frequencies, they could
fight nazy Germany. Radio frequency interuption could stop torpedoes
from being fired. The device the invented which sparked that day on
the piano earned a patent but not much was done with it at the time.
It
wouldn't be until the 1950s that the idea was put to real use. As
soon as they developed the technology, it spread through the Navy
like wildfire,’ says Richard Rhodes, author of Hedy’s
Folly.
‘This was just an absolutely wonderful system for protecting radio
communications.’ Later still with the Cuban Missle Crisis, these
frequency hopping radios branched out to all the other military
services.
This
device has brought about the science to make things like Wi-Fi, GPS
and cell phones work. Unfortunately, Hedy and George got very little
recognation at the time their invention was made. In fact it wouldn't
be until three years before Hedy's death in 2000 that she received
the Pioneer Award from the American Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And in 2014 she was posthumously inducted into the United States
National Inventors Hall of Fame.
‘Hedy
realised that what she came up with was important but I don't think
she knew how important it's going to be,’ says her son. ‘The
definition of importance is the more people that it affects over the
longer period of time. The longer this goes on and the more people it
affects the more important she will be.’
I
found learning about Hedy Lamarr to be very interesting. I love
hearing about women who made a difference, it's just a shame she was
only recognized for her beauty at the time.
Sources:
Phelan, Jessica 2014 January 16 7 of the most badass women who have ever lived (who you've probably never heard of)
Famous Women Inventors 2008 Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology
Carleton, Sharon and Alex McClintlock 2014 July 14 The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr
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