Review

At the beginning of World War II, she and the composer George Antheil developed a patent for a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to overcome the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work were tied to Bluetooth technology and are similar to the methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi. This work led to her induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She was also a Hollywood actress and musician.

Justifications

• She co-invented, with George Antheil, the first version of the spread spectrum that would enable long-distance wireless communications which has proved to be of vital importance for communications today.
• Together with George Antheil, she developed a patent of a radio guidance system for torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to overcome the threat of interference from the Axis powers.
• She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
• She was a Hollywood actress.

Biography

She was the only child of a secularised Jewish couple. Her parents belonged to upper-class Jewish families. Before the age of 11 she had mastered piano and dancing and could speak four languages. At the age of 16, she began her studies in the performing arts at the Berlin school of the film theatre director Max Reinhardt.

Friedrich Mandl arranged a marriage of convenience with her parents and she was betrothed against her will. Hedy later described this period as a time of real slavery.

Her husband, Friedrich Alexander Maria Fritz Mandl, was a supplier of munitions, fighter planes and control systems to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (of whom he was a personal friend). These sales of military equipment were made during the Italian occupation of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Very jealous, he forced her to accompany him on all dinners and business trips. She was locked up at home and subjected to strict control. Hedy had to give up her fledgling film career, and any other kind of activity other than that of a mere Mandl's troupe.

She had also taken advantage of her solitude to pursue her engineering studies, and used her intelligence to obtain from her husband's customers and suppliers the details of the weapons technology of the time, which she handed over to the US authorities years later. She also used meetings with them to devise and patent, in the 1940s, the frequency-switching technique that would bring her fame in later years.

In 1937 she finally escaped from Mandl. Once in Paris, she managed to travel more calmly to London (UK). She sold her jewellery and fled to the United States. By the time she landed, she had a seven-year contract and a new name: Hedy Lamarr. She was reborn as she returned to her life as an actress. Her acting career began in 1930. In the USA she became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938).

Knowing about the horrors of the Nazi regime through her husband Mandl, who was close to fascism, and being herself a Jew, she offered the US government all the confidential information she had at her disposal.

Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received patent number 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. This early version of frequency hopping, a spread-spectrum signal modulation technique, used a pair of synchronised, perforated drums (piano-like) to switch between 88 frequencies, and was designed to build radio-controlled torpedoes that could not be detected by the enemy.

The patent of August 11th 1942 bears the inscription H. K. Markey et al. The initials H. K. are those of Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr).

The fact that her patents were granted under her married name rather than her stage name prevented her contribution from receiving due recognition at the time.

Shortly afterwards, on October 1st of the same year, the first public mention of the invention appeared in The New York Times, although the authorities at the time did not consider the possibility of its immediate practical realisation. The delay in implementing it was due to the need to move from a mechanical to an electronic system. This was achieved by Sylvania Electronics, in 1957, and their engineering team fully recognised the patent to Lamarr and Antheil.

The first known use of the patent was in the Cuban missile crisis. During this 1962 crisis, this system was used in the remote control of marine tracking buoys. The same technique was incorporated in some of the devices used in the Vietnam War and later in the US defence satellite system (Milstar), until the 1980s, when the spread spectrum system saw its first contributions in civil engineering. Thus, with the massive introduction of digital technology at the beginning of the same decade, frequency switching made it possible to implement WIFI data communication. Source: Wikipedia 

Works

Bibliography

https://mujeresconciencia.com/2015/11/30/hedy-lamarr-la-inventora/Mujeres con ciencia, 17-03-2022, < https://mujeresconciencia.com/2015/11/30/hedy-lamarr-la-inventora/

Wikipedia, 17-03-2022, <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr>

Didactic approach

This author can be studied in:

Technology of 4th of ESO, in the block of information and communication technologies.
Computer science.

Documents