History is full of fascinating stories; some of them are so strange that they would be tossed onto the sludge pile of any self-respecting publisher if it came across their desk in the form of a novel’s premise. As Mark Twain so elegantly put it, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” The proof is in the pudding, as they say, in the following story:
What do the following three things have in common: A young Jewish woman by the name of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, born in 1914 in Vienna, Austria; the spread-spectrum technology that enables Wi-Fi, CDMA & Bluetooth; and a Hollywood starlet discovered in Paris by Louis B. Mayer in 1937? Quite a lot, in fact; because the woman born in Austria was otherwise known as Hedy Lamarr, inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 for developing technology useful for a radio guidance system for torpedoes, the concept behind Bluetooth, Wi-Fi & CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and now used for entertainment and communication around the globe.
Lamarr, who became known as “the most beautiful woman in Europe”, was the only child of a prominent upper-class Jewish family, and her birth name was Hedwig (Hedy is the diminutive form). At 18, she married Friedrich Mandl, reputed to be the third wealthiest man in Austria and an arms dealer who made a killing during the wars (in both senses of the word), in the proverbial bed with both Mussolini and the Nazis. Lamarr would attend lavish dinner parties and business meetings with her husband as he networked with scientists and those involved in military technology, and her intelligent mind soaked up the information, nurturing her scientific talents.
Lamarr escaped her controlling and jealous husband by disguising herself as a maid and fleeing to Paris, where she obtained a divorce. There she met Louis B. Mayer, who was scouting for European film talent; he had her change her surname to Lamarr, in homage to the silent film actress Barbara La Marr. In 1938 she made her American film debut in “Algiers”, but because of her beauty, she was often typecast as a seductress; to alleviate the boredom, she set up an engineering room in her home and turned to applied sciences and inventing. With the outbreak of World War II, she wanted to help in the war against the Germans, particularly in improving torpedo technology. She met a composer, George Antheil, who had been tinkering with automating musical instruments; together they came upon the concept of “frequency hopping”: Until then, torpedoes guided by radio signals could be jammed and sent off course just by tuning into their broadcasting frequency and causing interference; hopping frequencies would enable torpedoes to reach their target before their signal could be locked down.
In classic Hollywood-portrayal style, the US Navy wasn’t interested in a technology developed by a beautiful actress and a musician in some suburban home. I find the Stars and Stripes article above very telling as to their views of a pretty face actually being smart too; its tone is quite condescending from beginning to end. The US military didn’t apply the groundbreaking technology for another 20 years, until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. That same technology serves as the basis for our modern communication technology, enabling many people to use broadband simultaneously without interfering with each other; such situations as portrayed between Doris Day and Rock Hudson in “Pillow Talk” are unthinkable today, and all because of Hedy Lamarr.
So the next time you’re sitting in a café using Wi-Fi next to someone else on their own cell phone, give a wink to the memory of Hedy Lamarr. May you be inspired to reach beyond the possibilities, and create fiction worth reading even in the distant future!
Back before I was married, I lived in Paisley (Scotland) with an English roommate; we got along like clotted cream and jam, and, among other things, we would recite the following verse in sync any time we heard someone say, “I see”. There are longer, more elaborate versions that have been around for over 50 years. The mutations make it hard to trace it to the original source, as it seems that each person, school class or generation tweaks it with their own twist.
