From:   rovingorange@hotmail.com

Subject: Bartcop is confused about Hedy Lamarr; here's the story...
 
Hedy Lamarr did not invent radar.  A Brit named Robert Waston-Watt did.
But she did come up with a technology just as useful.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, aside from being one of the most beautiful actresses in screen history
(and the first to perform nude scenes, in the 1933 Czech film "Ecstacy"), was also blessed with
fierce intelligence.  And unlike a lot of successful, beautiful people in her day who actually supported the
fascists in Europe, she loathed the Nazis and wanted to do anything she could to see them defeated.

In 1937, she left Austria and her first husband (Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian arms manufacturer) for
the U.S., where she achieved phenomenal success in film and became the Hedy Lamarr we all know and love.

Her marriage to Mandl had given her a great deal of exposure to the world of munitions and arms,
particularly discussions of an idea to use radio signals to guide torpedoes. Although this would make
the torpedoes more accurate, such a system would also be fairly easy to jam.  To Lamarr, however,
it seemed apparent that if the torpedo and the guidance transmitter switched frequencies at the same time in
a seemingly unpredictable fashion, the signals could not be jammed.  But how could the two stay in sync?

Lamarr developed a friendship with a technically-savvy composer named George Antheil, who had once
composed a ballet using synchronized player pianos.  Antheil was able to adapt player-piano concepts to
Lamarr's idea.  In June, 1941, Antheil and Lamarr applied for their patent for "frequency-hopping" technology.
Their patent involved using slotted paper rolls--one in the torpedo, an exact duplicate in the guidance transmitter
--to shift both the torpedo and the transmitter to 88 different radio frequencies (the same number of keys on a piano)
at the same time. The frequencies shifted so rapidly it would be impossible for the Nazis to jam them.

Lamarr's and Antheil's patent was granted in 1942.  They gave free use of  the patent to the U.S. military to
assist in the war effort.  Although the Navy did not use the patent for torpedo guidance, they did adapt an
electronic version of Lamarr's frequency-hopping model for secure communications, and it is still in use today.
Lamarr's idea has been revived most recently in the form of "spread spectrum" technology for cellular phones,
which is just frequency-hopping with a new name.

--CJ Green, Health Researcher and All-Around Science Enthusiast
 
 

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