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Skriven 2005-05-10 06:45:00 av TOM WALKER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Hedy Lamarr - Invento 1/2
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Here is an article off the Internet about Hedy Lamarr and her invention.
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Female Inventors
Hedy Lamarr



"Any girl can be glamorous," Hedy Lamarr once said. "All she has to do
is stand still and look stupid." The film star belied her own apothegm
by hiding a brilliant, inventive mind beneath her photogenic exterior.
In 1942, at the height of her Hollywood career, she patented a
frequency-switching system for torpedo guidance that was two decades
ahead of its time.
Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She
went to Max Reinhardt's famous acting school in Berlin during her late
teens, and in 1933 she showed the world her acting skills and most of
herself in the film Extase (Ecstacy), which quickly became notorious for
its extensive nude scenes. The movie played in America after severe
cutting, and in 1937 its leading lady went to Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer,
of MGM, hired her and gave her the name Lamarr. Some people thought Hedy
to be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, but as an actress she was
overshadowed by heroines like Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn. In
1966, she published her autobiography, Ecstacy and Me.

Hedy Lamarr married Fritz Mandal, the first of six husbands, in 1933.
During their marriage, which broke up in 1937, Madame Mandl was an
institution in Viennese society, entertaining_and dazzling_foreign
leaders, including Hitler and Mussolini. Her husband 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. His wife clearly learned things from him, because
she and her co-inventor, George Antheil, later went on to invent the
torpedo guidance system that was two decades before its time.

Hedy Lamarr's co-inventor, George Antheil, was born in Trenton, New
Jersey, in 1900. His parents were from East Prussia. After studying
music at what is now the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, he went to
Europe to pursue a career as a concert pianist, heading first to Berlin
and then settling in Paris in 1923. He became one of the top
avante-garde composers of the time, writing and playing machinelike,
"mechanistic," rhythmically propulsive pieces with names like Airplane
Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Jazz Sonata, and Death of Machines. His Ballet
Méanique was scored for sixteen player pianos, xylophones and percussion
and was first performed in Paris in June 1926, in a version that had
only one player piano but also had electric bells, airplane propellers
and a siren. It caused an uproar.

Antheil knew practically everybody in Paris's literary, artistic and
musical circles, but in 1933 he returned permanently to the United
States. He became a film composer in Hollywood and a writer for Esquire
magazine, producing a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and
articles about romance and endocrinology. He even published a book
titled Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology.
In 1939 he set an article to Esquire about the future of Europe that
proved impressively accurate: It predicted that the war would start with
Germany invading Poland, that Germany would later attack Russia, and
then the United States would be drawn into the conflict.

He met Hedy Lamar in the summer of 1940, when they were neighbors in
Hollywood and she approached him witha question about glands: She wanted
to know how she could enlarge her breasts. In time the conversation came
around to weapons, and Lamarr told Antheil that she was contemplating
quitting MGM and moving to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to
the newly established National Inventors Council.

They began talking about radio control for torpedoes. The idea itself
was not new, but her concept of "frequency hopping" was. Lamarr brought
up the idea of radio control. Antheil's contribution was to suggest the
device by which synchronization could be achieved. He proposed that
rapid changes in radio frequencies could be coordinated the way he had
coordinated the sixteen synchronized player pianos in his Ballet
Méanique. The analogy was complete in his mind: By the time the two
applied for a patent on a "Secret Communication System," on June 10,
1941, the invention used slotted paper rolls similar to player-piano
rolls to synchronize the frequency changes in transmitter and receiver,
and it even called for exactly eighty-eight frequencies, the number of
keys on a piano.

Lamarr and Antheil worked on the idea for several months and then, in
December 1940, sent a description of it to the National Inventors
Council, which had been launched with much fanfare earlier in the year
as a gatherer of novel ideas and inventions from the general public. Its
chairman was Charles F. Kettering, the research director of General
Motors. Over its lifetime, which lasted until 1974, the council
collected more than 625,000 suggestions, few of which ever reached the
patent stage. But according to Antheil, Kettering himself suggested that
he and Lamarr develop their idea to the point of being patentable. With
the help of an electrical engineering professor from the California
Institute of Technology they ironed out its bugs, and the patent was
granted on August 11, 1942. It specified that a high-altitude
observiation plane could steer the torpedo from above.


Two pages of drawings from Lamarr and Antheil's patent. Note the
player-piano-like slotted paper on the second sheet. Markey is the name
of Hedy Lamarr's second of six husbands.

Putting the idea into practice was not so simple. Despite the enthusiasm
that Antheil said Kettering expressed, others were skeptical. One
examiner at the Inventors Council doubted the clockwork mechanism that
moved the perforated tape could be accurate enough. Antheil lobbied for
support for further research from among others, William C. Bullit,
Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. He argued that the
Germans were superior to the Americans in naval technology and that
something had to be done about it. He seemed driven in part by an urge
to prove his patriotism after all his years in Europe. Hedy Lamarr
meanwhile demonstrated her loyalty by raising seven million dollars in a
single evening selling war bonds.

Despite Antheil's lobbying, the Navy turned its back on the invention,
concluding that the mechanism would have been too bulky to fit into a
torpedo. Antheil disagreed; he insisted that it could be made small
enough to squeeze into a watch. And he thought he knew why the Navy was
so negative: "In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our
mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the
fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubted, we made our
mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who
examined our invention read no further than the words 'player piano. 'My
god,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player piano in a
torpedo.'"

In other words, it was a culture clash: the thick-headed brass hats were
incapable of considering the idea that musical technology could play any
part in a complicated piece of weaponry. But Antheil's explanation is
too simple; the invention had other problems. Describing them requires
looking at other developments in torpedo control at the time, especially
in Germany.

In the United States Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil, shunned by the
Navy, no longer pursued their invention. But in 1957, the concept was
taken up by engineers at the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division, in
Buffalo, New York. Their arrangement, using, of course, electronics
rather than piano rolls, ultimately became a basic tool for secure
military communications. It was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba
in 1962, about three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent had expired.
Subsequent patents in frequency changing, which are generally unrelated
to torpedo control, have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the
basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal
anti-jamming device used today, for example, in the U.S. government's
Milstar defense communication satellite system.
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