There’s a very interesting piece in today’s “i” (the UK apolitical newspaper). It reports plans to have Hedy Lamarr honoured with a memorial at her final resting place in Vienna. It transpires that she and the composer George Antheil designed a cryptic wireless communication system called “frequency hopping”, whereby radio transmissions jump from frequency to frequency. The patent was granted in 1942, and the inventors gave it away to the US government to aid the war effort – but the US navy rejected it.
Years later the US military revisited the patent and Lamarr’s and Antheil’s invention was deployed in 1962 on US warships during the Cuban missile crisis. The system paved the way for many of the communication systems commonly used today, including Bluetooth, GPS and wi-fi. Frequency hopping is also used in the $43bn Milstar satellite system used by the US US Air Force and US Space Command.
Susan Sarandon is involved in raising funds to have the memorial, which is already built, installed. It features eighty-eight stainless steel rods to represent the eighty-eight frequencies in Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency hopping patent. The rods will generate an optical illusion of Lamarr’s face when visitors stand directly in front of her grave. Sarandon and her colleague in Reframed Pictures, Katherine Drew, are also making a documentary about Lamarr’s life.
If all goes to plan, the installation will take place on June 10, seventy-five years to the day since Lamarr and Antheil filed their patent.
You should have seen when she tangled with Howard Stark over the discovery of "zero matter". It might not have made it into the history books but it was a good season of Agent Carter.
(This season's big bad was pretty transparently based on Ms. Lamarr.)
This is a true story I've known of for years. Hedy Lamarr was something, and something to look at, oh yeah. If only I could meet a woman like Hedy Lamarr. How many guys do think have said that?
There was a very good Channel 4 UK documentary on this some years ago which teetered betwixt stances that the idea was largely hers, against her being simply a catalyst for Antheil. It's not on YouTube, alas.
But this is:
In her twilight years, that old Channel 4 documentary claimed she bought an ordinary home somewhere in smalltown America, and lived in obscurity as an ordinary old lady, seemingly quite happily, even her neighbours were interviewed, a very different tale to the 'sad recluse' story above. She'd seen it all, done it all.
I've seen occasional attempts to debunk her contribution, but, as the above clip shows, she was a serious inventor. As was George Sanders, another Hollywooder who had ambiguities about film.
This is a true story I've known of for years. Hedy Lamarr was something, and something to look at, oh yeah. If only I could meet a woman like Hedy Lamarr. How many guys do think have said that?
