Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery, London
Hedy Lamarr, the movie star who
is less well known as an inventor.
Posted on 05/04/2004 6:52:17 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery, London
Hedy Lamarr, the movie star who
is less well known as an inventor.
n 1933, at age 19, she swam in the nude in the notorious Czech film "Ecstasy." Often called the most beautiful woman in the world, she married badly — to a domineering Austrian munitions manufacturer — and escaped by drugging the maid and climbing out a window. She made her way to Hollywood, where she starred in movies with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart.
Then there is the less known chapter of her life. In World War II, she offered her services as an inventor of weapons, coming up with a brainstorm that helped lead to wireless Internet and cellphones.
The Hedy Lamarr story: does it sound like the plot of a movie?
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation thinks so. The foundation, which typically supports science and technology projects like a census of marine life and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map millions of galaxies, is now making grants for screenplays with science or technology themes. This year, it awarded $48,000 to Gretchen Somerfeld, a Los Angeles writer, to refine her screenplay about Lamarr.
At the TriBeCa Film Festival on Sunday, actors read from Ms. Somerfeld's screenplay "Face Value." Sloan also makes grants at the Sundance and Hamptons film festivals.
"The bottom line in all of this is simply we think there are great opportunities here, great characters, great stories that have been largely unexplored," said Doron Weber, director of the Sloan program for public understanding of science and technology. "And when I speak of opportunities, I don't mean in an educational sense. We're speaking of what we believe are box office opportunities."
On Saturday at the festival, David Baxter, the other winner of a TriBeCa Sloan grant this year, will present background on his screenplay "The Broken Code." It tells of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA provided the inspiration for James Watson and Francis Crick to deduce its double-helix structure.
Franklin, who died in 1958, never knew that Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick had seen her images, and Mr. Baxter's screenplay traces the efforts of a friend and writer, Anne Sayre, who documented her contributions two decades later.
The Sloan Foundation also aids popular science books and Broadway plays. The goal, Mr. Weber said, is "to create more realistic and compelling and entertaining stories about science and technology and challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination."
Mr. Weber concedes that Hollywood, with its track record of mad-scientist stereotypes and plots that hinge on fallacious science, is a harder nut to crack. Movies are more expensive, take longer to produce and have to appeal to larger audiences who mostly do not care about any underlying physics or biology.
Filmmakers are not antiscience, he said; often, they just do not know any scientists. His program has also offered grants at film schools and has scientists speak to film students.
"The idea is to get more work into the pipeline," he said.
"Broken Code" is one of four projects related to the discovery of the double helix now circulating in Hollywood, and Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions has signed on as executive producer.
Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery, London
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images helped
resolve the structure of DNA,
and Ms. Lamarr are the subjects of two
screenplays that recently won grants.
Ms. Somerfeld confesses that science was her worst subject in school. What attracted her to Lamarr's story was not the technology, but her struggle to be seen as more than a beautiful woman. ("Any girl can be glamorous," Lamarr once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.")
Ms. Somerfeld called Lamarr "a woman who was out of sync with her time."
"Had she been born in another era," the writer said, "she could have really gone for it and lived up to her potential."
In her marriage to Fritz Mandl, the munitions maker, Lamarr sat in on his business meetings and learned that one of the elusive goals was to control weapons remotely by radio signals, what today would be called smart bombs. But radio signals can be readily jammed.
Lamarr's insight was to realize that continuously and randomly changing the radio frequencies would defy jamming. In early 1940, she and the composer George Antheil devised a system for airplanes to direct torpedoes toward their targets. Inspired by player pianos, Antheil conceived of a pair of paper rolls, one in the airplane, one in the torpedo, to specify the sequence of changing frequencies. "It's the damnedest Rube Goldberg you ever saw," said David Hughes, a retired colonel and a communications expert who will be the scientific consultant to Ms. Somerfeld. "But the seminal idea was there."
Antheil and Lamarr patented their scheme, which they called "frequency hopping," and donated it to the government. The Navy, doubting that the paper-roll devices could be built, declined to try to pursue it but nonetheless classified the idea.
An article in The New York Times on Oct. 1, 1941, briefly noted Lamarr's invention, saying, "So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details."
In the late 50's, the frequency-hopping idea began to be used in military computer chips. Lamarr received no recognition, because the patent remained classified until 1985. Since then, the idea has been applied to cellphones, cordless phones and Wi-Fi Internet protocols that allow many people to share the same range of radio frequencies. (If the frequencies continuously change, the chances of one signal's interfering with another drop.)
Lamarr, who lived a reclusive life in her later years, won the Pioneer Award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997. The award recognizes major achievements in computer communications. She died in 2000.
With the vagaries of filmmaking, "Face Value" is still far from production, but it has a chance, Mr. Weber said.
"The film has buzz," he said. "It's now in the pile of things they're going to look at."
I do think that the statement that she hadn't reached her potential is just a little unrealistic. A very large number of very brilliant people are denied recognition because their work is classified - it's one of the sacrifices people make for their country during wartime. Other equally talented people end up bleeding to death in muddy trenches.
Late 50s -- invented by a guy named Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments. In the early 60's they already had hand-held caculators on the market.
I have had a copy of Blazing Saddles for years. ;)
I bought the VHS for my late grandpa years ago.
He was a huge fan of westerns, and thought it was hilarious.
He watched it too many times to count, just as I have.
Hollywood could never get away with making that movie today, which is just one of the reasons I love it so much.
No, no, no. Unless you were The Incredible Hulk.
If you don't believe me, consider this...
In the Apollo "command module" there was an "on board computer" that cost more than $20 million. Its operator display was big (like 8" by 12") and had several lines of big seven-segment numerals.
That computer had approximately the same processing power as the HP-65 programmable calculator that came out in about 1973, for $695. But the Apollo computer was designed in the mid-'60s, and was one of the reasons chips were invented (yes, I know there were others, but one thing at a time).
Believe me, if NASA could have put a hand-held calculator into Apollo, they would have.
In about 1966, Wang came out with a desktop calculator that was all-electronic. It could do square roots, IIRC. It had four little identical workstations that plugged into a central processor by means of thick cables. The central unit was about the size of a modern-day PC. They had "nixie tube" displays.
(steely)
The first hand-held calculator --- The year was 1967 --- the same year the first Apollo flew. NASA could not incorporate much in the way of "new" technology once their design window closed. It's way too expensive and dangerous to start backfitting things. The Shuttle is loaded with some "ancient" technology.
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Jack Kilby and his Calculator
It's All in the Marketing
Scientists might come up with great ideas for new technology, but it doesn't make much of a difference unless manufacturers start using the ideas. In the case of the integrated chip, industry was pretty slow on the uptake. The new chip, with its collection of transistors all made from a single crystal, could miniaturize practically anything -- if only someone was interested.
To snag the world's attention, Texas Instruments needed a marketing gimmick. They wanted a flashy product to showcase the IC. A calculator seemed just the thing. In a mere two years, a TI group including Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel, and led by Jack Kilbydeveloped a calculator small enough to be held in your hand. Just over six inches tall, this portable calculator certainly surpassed the all-transistor calculator released just a year earlier -- that calculator weighed 55 pounds and cost $2,500.
Resources:
-- "Team of Three Texas Instruments Engineers Invented the Portable, Hand-Held
Electronic Calculator in 1967", Editorial backgrounder, Texas Instruments
-- "The Chip that Jack Built Changed the World," Editorial Backgrounder, Texas Instruments
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