Not only was Heddy Lamar a looker but bright too:
Frequency-hopping spread-spectrum invention
Avant garde composer
George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for
Ballet Mécanique, originally written for
Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple
player pianos playing simultaneously.
Lamarr took her idea to Anthiel and together, Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a
secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942,
US Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey", Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of
frequency hopping used a
piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided
torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
The idea was not implemented in the USA until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba
[5] after the patent had expired. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the
Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution.
[1] It is reported that, in 1998, Ottawa wireless technology developer Wi-LAN, Inc. "acquired a 49 percent claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock" (Eliza Schmidkunz,
Inside GNSS),
[6] although expired patents have no economic value. Antheil had died in 1959.
Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern
spread-spectrum communication technology, such as
COFDM used in
Wi-Fi network connections and
CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.
[7] Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 patent
Secrecy Communication System (
1598673) seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil's patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.
Lamarr wanted to join the
National Inventors Council, but she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell
War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.
For several years during the 1990s, the boxes of the current
CorelDRAW software suites were graced by a large Corel-drawn image of Hedy Lamarr, in tribute to her pre-computer scientific discoveries. These pictures were winners in CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contests. Far from being flattered, however, Lamarr sued Corel for using the image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. They reached an undisclosed settlement in 1999.
[8]
