Hop, Skip and a Jump: Remembering Hedy Lamar [View all]

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2012/01/09/hop-skip-and-a-jump-remembering-hedy-lamar/



Just before the holidays, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes — who wrote the definitive history of the Manhattan Project with The Making of the Atomic Bomb — published a new biography of film star Hedy Lamar: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. Why? There’s been a resurgence of public interest in this forgotten star ever since her wartime patents came to light. Lamar published her own memoir, Ecstasy and Me, in 1967, and two other biographies appeared in 2010, so Rhodes is in very good company.

Fans of classic film know Hedy Lamarr for her memorable silver screen performances. But this lovely actress also made a small contribution to wartime technology with her co-invention of an early form of spread spectrum communication technology, or frequency hopping, in which a noise-like signal is transmitted on a much-larger bandwidth than the frequency of the original information. In the 1930s, Europe (and much of the Western world) was on the brink of a second world war and military leaders from many different nations were scrambling to find advanced weapons technologies to gain an edge in the escalating hostilities. One place nobody thought to look was Hollywood, which might explain why an obscure patent filed in 1942 failed to garner much notice.

Born in November 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, Lamarr came from “Jewish haute bourgeoisie” stock (Wikipedia’s words, not mine). Her father was a bank director and her mother was a Hungarian pianist, who made sure Hedy studied ballet and piano as a child. As a teen, the young Hedy attended a famed acting school in Berlin headed by director Max Reinhardt.

She dropped out of school to be Reinhardt’s production assistant and had bit parts in two films before starring as a love-starved young wife married to a much older man in a Czech film called Ecstasy. (You can view clips here, but must verify that you’re over 18, due to mild nudity.)