Hedy Lamarr, 1914 - 2000

Hedy Lamarr was a remarkable combination of movie star and inventor. She was born in Vienna in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She achieved fame in 1933 as the star of the scandalous Czech film Extase, which featured the first nude scene in cinematic history. The same year Lamarr married Fritz Mandl, one of the five leading European armament manufacturers. Mandl specialized in shells and grenades, but from the mid-thirties on he also manufactured military aircraft. He was interested in control systems and conducted research in the field. Mandl kept his young wife by his side as he attended hundreds of dinners and meetings with arms developers, builders, and buyers, where Lamarr clearly learned some things. The marriage broke up in 1937, when Lamarr escaped to London. She soon was signed by MGM and moved to Hollywood, where she starred in hugely successful films, such as the 1949 Samson and Delilah.

In 1940 Lamarr became friends with avant-garde composer George Antheil, who wrote and played pieces with names like Airplane Sonata and Ballet Mecanique. Scarcely a year later, the pair applied for a patent on a device that would reduce the danger of detection or jamming for radio-controlled torpedoes. Although the idea of radio control for torpedoes was not new, the concept of "frequency hopping" was. Frequency hopping means broadcasting a signal over a seemingly random series of radio frequencies, switching from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals. Anyone trying to eavesdrop would hear only random noise, like a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver were hopping in sync, the message would go through loud and clear. Lamarr brought up the idea of radio control; Antheil's contribution was to suggest the device by which synchronization could be achieved. On 11 August 1942 they obtained their patent on a "Secret Communication System."

Although the Navy shunned the device at that time, by 1957 the concept was taken up by engineers at the Sylvania Electronic Systems. In 1962, three years after the patent expired, the pair's idea was used in military communication systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba. Subsequent patents in frequency changing have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal anti-jamming devices used today, for example, in the U.S. government's Milstar defense communications satellite system.

Neither Lamarr nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the commercialization of their patent. Their invention, moreover, was only formally acknowledged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in March 1997 -somewhat belatedly for Antheil, who died in 1959. Lamarr's son, Anthony Loder, received the EFF award on behalf of his mother, then an 83-year-old Florida retiree. She died three years later, on 19 January 2000.