Thursday 22 January 2015

Hedy Lamarr, Actress, Mathematician and Inventor

She was a film-star in the most glamorous era of Hollywood, between the 1930s and 1950s, and was hyped by the MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, but Hedy Lamarr was definitely not just a pretty face.  Hedy earned her place on this blog because of her pioneering work on anti-torpedo systems.  Like Alan Turin, Hedy wanted to use her flair for science and invention to help the US Navy in the anti-Nazi war-effort of the 1940s.  Alan Turin’s achievement in developing pioneering computer systems to crack the Enigma code is now well-known; largely thanks to the recent block-buster film The Imitation Game.

Sadly for Hedy Lamarr and the US Navy, her ideas, though way ahead of their time, were not taken seriously, and were ignored during the war years. In fact she was advised by National Inventors’ Council that she would better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. How condescending!

Her ideas were finally taken up in the 1960s, and were implemented on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her invention concerned radio-controlled torpedoes, which were used by the Germans during World War II and wreaked havoc among the allies. She realised that it would be possible to send the destructive missiles off course by jamming the radio signals that were guiding them.  The idea was to transmit interference at the same frequency as the missile guidance system. 

In collaboration with the technologically-minded composer George Antheil, a friend and neighbour of Lamarr, she developed and patented the ingenious concept of ‘frequency-hopping’.  This was partly inspired by Antheil’s musical know-how, and deployed a piano roll mechanism from a player-piano (aka Pianola) to change the frequency of the interference in an unpredictable way. The piano roll allowed them to use 88 different frequencies relating to the 88 keys on a piano: - too many frequencies for the enemy to scan.

Lamarr's talent for invention didn't stop with the frequency-hopping idea.  She also came up with "bouillon" cubes designed to turn plain water into a Coke-like drink.  Sadly this was a bit of a flop as it tasted disgusting.  There was another idea for a "skin-tautening technique based on the principles of the accordion" which was no doubt inspired by the need to maintain her good looks for the sake of her movie career. This was a sad pre-shadowing of her disastrous experiences with plastic surgery, which left her disfigured and reluctant to leave the house at all in her later years.

Little is known about her early life and education in Austria, and I wonder what it was that inspired her interest in technology. By the age of seventeen she was already starring in her first film role, so she cannot have had a huge amount of scientific education.  Maybe it had something to do with her first marriage to Friedrich Mandl, who was chairman of a leading Austrian armaments company founded by his father. Whatever the cause, her interest was more than just a passing fad.  According to her biographer, Richard Rhodes,

She set aside one room in her home, had a drafting table installed with the proper lighting, and the proper tools - had a whole wall in the room of engineering reference books

During her lifetime Hedy never received any recognition for her scientific ideas, and didn’t make a penny out of her frequency-hopping patent, which was signed over to the US Navy for free in the 60s. There has been a lot of interest in the patent in recent years, and Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2014, 14 years after her death.  The important legacy of their idea is that it helped to create a foundation for the current boom in IT and communications, such as Blue-tooth, CDMA and COFDM.