Hedy Lamarr: How a Famous Actress Revolutionized Weapons Systems

I remember reading articles back in early 2000 at the time of her death about how Heddy Lamar, the famous actress was much more than just a pretty face. In fact she and a co-venturer had developed and patented a radio frequency hopping device that led the way to technologies in weapons guidance systems including a new kind of guidance system for torpedos. Under their patent, the receiver and the transmitter would have the frequency-hopping codes on a tape or roll, which was fed through a sensing mechanism, very similar to the way a player piano roll carries musical information. The system made jamming very difficult. Sadly, the U.S. military did not take them seriously soon enough.

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By the 1950's, the patent on their device had expired when engineers at Sylvania "re-discovered" frequency-hopping. They called it "spread spectrum." These electronic devices were designed for use during the Cuban Missile crisis in the sixties. Now, a new play is playing in New York City that looks at the development of the system by Lamar and her partner.Here are highlights about the play from the Scientific American:

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Hedy Lamarr wasn't just a beautiful movie star. According to a new play, Frequency Hopping, she was also a shrewd inventor who devised a signal technology that millions of people use every day. Lamarr—born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria in 1914—developed a passion for helping the U.S. military after walking away from an unhappy marriage to an Austrian Fascist weapons manufacturer in 1937. In an attempt to stall her acting career, he had brought her to his business meetings, where she found herself continuously listening to "fat bastards argue antiaircraft this, vacuum tube that," explains Lamarr's character—played by Erica Newhouse—in the play, Frequency Hopping. In the meetings, they had talked about developing detection devices to listen to, and jam, the radio signals that American aircraft and weapons used to communicate with one another; and Lamarr wanted to foil their plans.

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Lamarr realized that by transmitting radio signals along rapidly changing, or "hopping," frequencies, American radio-guided weapons would be far more resilient to detection and jamming. The sequence of frequencies would be known by both the transmitter and receiver ahead of time, but to the German detectors their message would seem like gibberish. "No jammer could detect it, no German code-breaker could decipher a completely random code," she says in the play.

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The technology, says Singer, was far ahead of its time. Although her ideas were at first ignored, the technology (which she and Antheil patented in 1942) was later used by the military—during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, for example—and more recently, it has been employed in wireless technologies like cell phones. It was eventually recognized in 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored Lamarr with a special Pioneer Award and she became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award.