Hot on the heels of our latest article on Standard Essential Patents (‟SEP”), here is an example of an exceptional woman, Hedy Lamarr, who not only was a Hollywood movie star, but also the co-inventor of a SEP called the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technique (‟FHSS”). It is this same technology which allows, today, the operation of the wireless communication standard Bluetooth, of Wi-Fi and of the GPS. Let’s dive in, shall we?
1. Who was Hedy Lamarr?
Born on 9 November 1914 in Vienna’s high society, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler grew up as an only child, between her father, Emil Kiesler, an Austrian secular Jewish banker, and her mother, Gertrud ‟Trude” Kiesler (née Lichtwitz), born Jewish but converted to Catholicism, a Hungarian piano concert artist.
Her mother taught her musical and dancing skills. But Hedwig, extremely beautiful (she won a beauty contest at 12 years’ old in Vienna), was bored. She wanted to act and was fascinated by theatre and film. She skipped classes to interpret scenarios in a Viennese studio.
She also began to learn about technological inventions with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how devices functioned.
Hedwig started out in the film industry as a script girl, at Sascha-Film, then she got a role as an extra in the feature film ‟Money on the street” in 1930, and then a small speaking part in ‟Storm in a water glass” (1931).
Her efforts and determination paid out since, in early 1933, at age 18, she was given the lead role in Gustav Machaty’s film ‟Ecstasy”, playing the neglected young wife of an indifferent old man. The movie caused a stir, showing the face of ‟Heddie Kietzler”, as she was known then, in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief scenes of nudity. ‟Ecstasy” went on to gain world recognition after winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. However, while the film was regarded as an artistic work, in most parts of Europe, it was banned in America for being ‟overly sexual” and in Nazi Germany for having its main character played by a Jewish woman.
In August 1933, at age 18, Heddie married 33-year-old Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian Jewish military merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. Mandl had close ties to the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini and, later, to German führer Adolf Hitler.
Heddie, was very much under the thumb of her extremely controlling husband (she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzeneau, and was forbidden by Mandl from continuing her career as an actress). However, she attended lavish parties that Mandl gave for his guests, the Italian and German dictators and their posse, as well as accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. During these encounters, Heddie gathered sensitive information, learning that these dictators wanted to control their aerial torpedoes, submarines and tanks by radio, but that those radio communication attempts were intercepted by their enemies despite jamming attempts.
These meetings were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science, despite this hostile and anti-Semite environment.
She left (fled from) Mandl and Austria in 1937, disguising herself as her own maid, and came to Paris.
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of movie studio MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of USD125 a week), but then booked herself onto the ‟Normandie”, the same New York-bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough, during the journey, to secure a USD500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to ‟Hedy Lamarr”, in typical star system fashion, and to distance herself from her real identity, and the ‟Ecstasy lady” reputation associated with it. He brought Hedy to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the ‟world’s most beautiful woman”.
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making ‟Algiers” (1938), an American version of the French film ‟Pépé le Moko” (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a ‟national sensation”, while she was billed as an unknown but well-publicised Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, ‟everyone gasped … Lamarr’s beauty literally took one’s breath away”.
In future Hollywood films, Hedy was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Most of her films were either flops or moderate successes, despite co-starring with Hollywood legends such as Spencer Tracy in ‟I take this woman” (1940), Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Tracy in ‟Boom Town” (1940), James Steward in ‟Come live with me” (1941) and Stewart, Judy Garland and Lana Turner in ‟Ziegfeld girl” (1941).
However, Hedy was cast in ‟White cargo” (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon, and playing the exotic Arab seductress Tondelayo. It was a huge hit. This movie contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: ‟I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?”. This line typifies many of Lamarr’s roles, which emphasised her beauty and sensuality, while giving her relatively few lines.
The lack of acting challenges bored Hedy.
2. What did she invent?
She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
‟Hedy didn’t drink. She didn’t like to party”, says biographer Richard Rhodes. ‟Her idea of a good evening was a quiet dinner party with some intelligent friends where they could discuss ideas – which sounds so un-Hollywood, but Hedy had to find something else to do to occupy her time”.
So she had a drafting table installed in her house and started inventing. Including on the film set between takes.
Among her projects was an improved stoplight and a tablet that, when dissolved in water, created a soda similar to Coca-Cola.
‟She laughed later and said, ‟Well, it never really worked”. It probably tasted like an Alka-Seltzer tablet, which is basically what it was,” Rhodes says. ‟But she was constantly looking at the world and thinking, ‟Well, how could that be fixed? How could that be improved?””.
In 1940, Hedy met George Antheil, an American ‟avant-garde” composer, pianist, author of a flagship work for electronic piano entitled ‟Ballet mécanique”, and inventor.
They became fast friends, bonding over a common interest in female endocrinology.
As mentioned above, during the late 1930s, Hedy had attended arm deals with her then-husband, arms dealer Mandl, ‟possibly to improve his chances of making a sale”. From these meetings, she had learnt that navies needed ‟a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water”. Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo’s guidance system and set it off course. Indeed, Hedy knew that U-boats, the German submarines, caused a lot of damage among US ships using jamming, notably by derailing torpedoes off course.
Hedy’s idea was to prevent jamming by frequency hopping, more specifically by having the torpedo guided via radio signal with anti-jamming frequency hopping.
Frequency hopping is the simplest version of a radio transmission technique today known as ‟spread-spectrum technique”, which refers to any method that widens the frequency band of a signal. Normally, radio station broadcast on a single carrier frequency, which makes eavesdropping deliberately easy: you tune your radio to the correct frequency and receive the programming. By contrast, frequency hopping prevents the interception and decipherment of a transmission by shifting the carrier frequency in a predetermined, usually pseudorandom fashion – in other words, in a way that appears random but is in fact produced by a deterministic algorithm. A receiver hopping around in synchrony with the transmitter can pick up the message, but an eavesdropper tuned to a single frequency will hear only a blip as that bit of message flashes by. Frequency hopping is largely jam-proof as well. If the frequencies are spaced widely enough, any jamming signal will interfere with only a small part of the message.
When discussing this idea for a secure torpedo guidance system that employed this novel technique known as ‟frequency hopping”, with her new friend Antheil, Hedy’s idea met Antheil’s previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronising note-hopping in the ‟avant-garde” piece written as a score for the film ‟Ballet mécanique” (1923-1924) that involved multiple synchronised player pianos. Antheil’s idea in the piece was to synchronise the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realised that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturised.
Hedy Lamarr and Antheil exchanged their ideas, drew plans and set up a secret communication system with the help of an 88-note electric piano and its perforated rolls. They create this method consisting in often changing frequencies to send information, and for their reception. That’s the spread-spectrum technique. The frequency field is very wide, using 88 bandwidths instead of one, hence as many notes than on Antheil’s pianola.
In late December 1940, based on the strength of the initial submission of their ideas to the National Inventors Council (‟NIC”), a US government organisation and clearinghouse for inventions with possible military and national defence uses, the NIC introduced Antheil and Hedy to Samuel Stuart Mackeown, professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, to consult on the electrical systems.
Hedy hired the law firm Lyon & Lyon to draft the application for the patent, which was granted as US patent 2,292,387 on 11 August 1942, under her legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey.
The thinking at the time by all the experts that looked at it was that it was a viable idea. ‟This would have worked”, said Rhodes. But when the US Navy brass looked at the invention, ‟they said, ‟What, you want to put a player piano in a torpedo? That won’t work!””. So they threw this invention on the back shelf, rejecting it on the basis that it would be too large to fit in a torpedo.
The file remained classified as top secret until 1959.
3. Hedy Lamarr’s years after her ground-breaking invention and SEP
The US Navy’s patronising response to, and short-sighted view on, Hedy’s and Antheil’s proposal to apply their invention to the war efforts was, ‟You should go raise money for the war via war bonds, like other movie stars. That’s what you should be doing instead of this silly inventing”.
So Hedy did precisely that, using her celebrity to raise millions in war bonds – dismissed again for her brains in favour of her beauty.
Biding her time, Hedy kept on working on her inventions in her workshop during the following years.
She acted in various films, with more or less success. ‟Samson and Dalila” (1949) from Cecil B. Demille was a success, but Hedy made poor career choices, rejecting the female lead roles in ‟Gaslight” and ‟Casablanca” (that were both grabbed by savvy Ingrid Bergman).
While Hedy’s star slowly faded, she designed and developed, along with former fifth husband William Howard Lee, the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
She was arrested twice for shoplifting, in 1966 and 1991, in the US (while she had some money in her purse, at the time of the thefts).
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Hedy has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Boulevard, adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered. Hedy is one of the few stars, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, credited for her invention, and not only for her career as an actress.
Becoming more and more reclusive, with her eyesight failing and further to botched plastic surgeries, Hedy retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A six-times divorcee, Hedy Lamarr was estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left that son James Loder out of her will, and he later sued for control of the USD3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for USD50,000.
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Hedy’s only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years.
Hedy Lamarr died alone in her home, in Casselberry, Florida, in January 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread part of her ashes in Austria’s Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014, a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. The remainder of her ashes were buried there.
4. Her inventive legacy, after a life fully lived
The terms on which Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil granted their patent rights on the ‟frequency hopping” invention, to the US government, were that the assignment of the patent rights was free and took place via a donation of this invention to the NIC.
However, if the invention was found worthy of use, i.e. the invention was applied in ‟real life”, for commercial purposes, Lamarr and Antheil would be paid by way of royalties.
But, as mentioned above, the US Navy rejected the invention, not understanding its potential, during World War Two. The patent was then classified as ‟top secret”.
To add insult to injury, the US government seized Hedy Lamarr’s patent, in 1942, under the ‟return of property by the alien property custodian act”.
In fact, Lamarr’s and Antheil’s device was way ahead of its time. Although it was patented at the height of World War Two, frequency hopping relied on electronics technology that did not exist yet.
Though the US government did not deploy the ‟secret communication system” during World War Two, the US Navy commissioned a project to acoustically detect submarines using sonar buoys remote-controlled from airplanes employing ‟frequency hopping” in the 1950s.
Twenty years after its conceptualisation, their invention was rediscovered by the engineers of the US Navy, from 1962 onwards, during the Cuban missile crisis, when it was used by US military ships during a blockade of Cuba. That was the first instance when the large-scale military deployment of Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency hopping technology was implemented – not for the remote-controlled guidance of torpedoes, but to provide secure communications among the ships involved in the naval blockade.
However, this implementation in 1962 was three years after the patent expired (i.e. 1959). Therefore, Lamarr and Antheil did not get paid any royalties, ever (although, if they had been advised by a smart intellectual property lawyer, they could have used the US patent law provision, pursuant to which, when a patent expires, an inventor has six years to sue for payment).
Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation honoured Lamarr and Antheil (posthumously, for the latter, who had died in 1959) a belated Pioneer Award for their contributions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation price is given to persons who have contributed significantly to the progress of telecommunications and computer science. Later in the same year, Hedy Lamarr became the first female recipient of the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, a prestigious lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors that is dubbed ‟The Oscar of Inventing”.
It is reported that, in 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN Inc., ‟acquired a 49 per cent claim to the long expired patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock” (although expired patents have no economic value).
Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed ‟the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.
Indeed, Lamarr’s and Antheil’ frequency-hopping scheme shares some concepts with, and serves as a basis for, modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, Coded Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (‟COFDM”) used in Wi-Fi network connections, and Code Division Multiple Access (‟CDMA”) used in some cordless and wireless telephones.
In the end, Lamarr’s and Antheil’s device was resurrected and proved to be one of the forerunners of spread-spectrum communications, which has applications in wireless communication standards such as satellite systems, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellphone technology.
For example, adaptive frequency-hopping spread spectrum (‟AFH”) is used in Bluetooth to improve resistance to radio frequency interference by avoiding crowded frequencies in the hopping sequence. This type of adaptive transmission is easier to implement with FHSS than with direct-sequence spread spectrum.
Hedy Lamarr was a complex and multi-talented human being who invented one of the standard essential patents to all our modern communication tools. Her star will only increase in relevance and reverence in the coming years. She was a true pioneer.
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