Many people don't just get how much women have contributed to the field of computing for most of its history. Sometimes they are rendered subordinate, sometimes they are pushed to the background -- and then forgotten.

Thanks to the information age however (made possible by computers), now anyone can look back in time and be amazed at how much women have made possible in computing.

Hedy Lamarr

Image Source: 1944 Publicity Photo for the movie "Heavenly Body"

Case in point. If you are above a certain age, you probably know this face even without the name. If not, that's what Google is for. I know that's how I found her.

Again, if you are above a certain age, you probably know her as exactly that, an famed actress in Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s. What you might not know is that, when she wasn't dazzling eyes and ears on the screen, she was inventing a large piece of the technological future we now live in.

Now you might ask: "But Nonso, Hedy Lamarr isn't a forgotten icon. She was a famous actress and even her scientific effort is now known" and you would be right -- but you are speaking with the benefit of hindsight. The spread-spectrum technology that she invented along with George Antheil was patented and offered to the United States Navy in 1942 but it was rejected and forgotten until decades later. She (almost) didn't live long enough to get the credit for her work -- just like the subject of a future entry in this series, a woman you know from Hidden Figures.

Speaking of movies, Lamarr is getting one of her own too soon. A documentary this time.

Tribeca Movie Poster for Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

But leave that. Rewind: Let us see how she got to that point. Born in 1914 Vienna, Hedwig Eva Marie Kiesler* was the only child of a Jewish banker father and a pianist mother from Budapest (Prague?). We don't know much about her childhood up (although we do know she admired her father more than any other man in the world and that he laid the foundations for her interest in science) till she was discovered as an actress in her teens and went off to Berlin to learn the tricks of the acting trade.

Soon she was now acting on the stage and the screen, gaining some form of notoriousness by being one of the first actresses to appear naked in a cinema film (something called Ecstacy), no big deal by today's standards but shocking in those days. Apparently, this got her her first husband, a wealthy arms dealer named Fritz Mandl. She was 19. Supposedly, he spent a good amount of his wealth buying up every copy of the movie -- which made the movie makers very happy because they just printed more copies.

During their marriage, she spent a lot of time with him and his colleagues: engineers, generals, magnates and even future heads of state (such as two guys you might know called Mussolini and Hitler) As they discussed the various cutting-edge technologies they were involved in such as submarines and torpedo guidance systems, none of them knew that she was actually paying attention and remembering what she heard.

I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. . . . He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. . . . I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” - Hedy Lamarr, on her first marriage

It seems the marriage was not very happy for her because in 1937, she disguised herself as one of the maids and ran away from him. She stopped in Paris for a divorce then got on a ship to America. On that ship, she met a man named Louis B. Meyer. If his name sounds familiar, it is because the 'M' in 'Meyer' is also one of the 'M's in M.G.M, the movie studio. By the time they both got off that ship on American shore, she had a movie contract with his company.

A few years after that, World War II began and Mz. Lamarr found herself wanting to help the war effort in some way (especially since her own country had been taken over by the Nazis.) She cast her mind back to those dinner parties with her former husband and put some twos and twos together to get 222. She thought of the submarine underwater warfare and the torpedoes and the guidance systems and the jamming. This led her to thinking that, if those guidance signals were to keep changing in a way the Allies knew but the Nazis did not, then the Nazis would not be able to jam it anymore.

Along the way, Lamarr stumbled across a collaborator, a piano player named George Antheil. He himself was also a clever inventor who had created a system for synchronizing multiple pianos to play together. This for Hedy Lamar became the missing piece of the puzzle for her own technological design. In short, Antheil's invention was what allowed Lamarr's invention to go from theory to practical. Before long, they were friends and worked together to create the design. By June 10 1941, they had submitted it to the patent office:

Source: Dirk DeKlein's History of Sorts Blog

note she's still using her married name, just not in her movies lol

So what actually was this technology they put together, with Hedy Lamarr's concept and George Antheil's hardware? Well, in the patent they called it the "secret communication system" and they refer to changing "... the tuning of the transmitting and receiving apparatus from time to time ..." What does this mean? First we must understand Antheil's creation. Some time before he met Lamarr, George Antheil was involved in a concert called "Ballet Mechanique." It was a unique concert because he had arranged for sixteen pianos and many other instruments (including drums and aircraft propellers!) to all be controlled by someone playing just one single "master piano". The mechanism that made this possible was derived from "player pianos", a set of paper rolls that were arranged into different patterns to create different tunes on the piano.

Source: Dirk DeKlein's History of Sorts Blog

In the case of their invention, the different patterns would be used to send different radio frequencies from the submarine to the torpedo. Lamarr and Antheil chose to have 88 frequencies - like a piano has 88 keys.

Source: Smithsonian Website - Paper roll used in the Secret Communication System

Unfortunately for both of them, the US Navy decided not to use their device claiming the device was too bulky to be used on a submarine but Antheil believed it was because they found the idea of it coming from a player piano embarrassing.

Source: Wikipedia - George Antheil

That was it. Hedy went back to movies and sold war bonds as an outlet for her patriotism while Antheil returned to music until he died in 1959. By coincidence, that was the same year the patent on the frequency-hopping device expired, meaning that anyone who wanted could now use it without Lamarr's permission and that was exactly what happened. Almost twenty years later in the 1960s, some unknown engineers picked up the dusty technology out of the archives and saw its potential. Shortly after, the technology was being used by the military after all and within decades, wifi, Bluetooth and cellular phones were coming into the world, all thanks to the ideas of Hollywood actres

Source: Wikipedia

Here's something many people don't know: spread-spectrum wasn't the only thing Hedy Lamarr invented. She also invented a tablet you could drop into water and instantly get coca-cola as well as another military weapon, a shell that that automatically explodes when it is near the enemy ship (proximity explosive) There is also an anecdote story where she helped the aviation billionaire-genius-pioneer Howard Hughes to make his planes faster by realizing the wings were too rectangular or square. She then found books about birds and insects to find better wing-shapes for him to use.

Image source: Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

As we mentioned above, Hedy Lamarr almost didn't live long enough to be publicly acclaimed for her achievement in science. She died in 2000. Thankfully, in 1997, she was presented with the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award by Douglas Engelbart the guy who invented the computer mouse(!) and Linus Torvalds, the guy who invented the Linux operating system. Supposedly, her response was "It's about time."

I can' think of a better ending than that.

*long names are for writers. Hollywood likes its stars names short and catchy

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REFERENCES

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/hedy-lamarr-6139.php

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/02/143055128/the-beauty-and-brains-behind-hedys-folly - National Public Radio Web Site

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/arts/music/09ball.html - New York Times

http://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2889/bombshell-interview-with-richard-rhodes-on-hedy-lamarr - Science and Film

http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/when-next-you-use-bluetooth-think-of-hedy-lamarr/ - Moving Image Archive News

http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-03569.html

http://www.newsweek.com/hedy-lamarr-biography-hedys-folly-richard-rhodes-review-66239 - Newsweek

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/04/hedy-lamarr-documentary-clip - Vanity Fair

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201106/physicshistory.cfm

https://dirkdeklein.net/2017/07/21/hedy-lamarr-wifi-during-wwii/ - Dirk DeKlein's History of Sorts

http://invention.si.edu/movie-star-some-player-pianos-and-torpedoes - Smithsonian

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Part One of this series about women making history in computing (human and otherwise) can be found here (starring Lady Ada Lovelace)

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Part One of my other series about women making history in wartime can be found here (starring the lethal Lyudmilla Pavliuchenko) while Part Two can be found here (starring the amazing Nancy Wake)

Thanks for reading and do like the animated gif says! 😃