'' Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood actress, was also a brilliant inventor.
She got paid for her movies, but not for her invention.''
|
"I guess they just take and forget about a person " By Fleming Meeks
|
 |
Recent News: Of course by now most of you know that Hedy has passed away. She died peacefully in her sleep, and her ashes will be scattered in the Austrian forest near Vienna that she brightened in 'Ecstasy'.
THE SCENE: a dinner party at the Hollywood home of actress Janet Gaynor
The year: 1940. Viennese actress Hedy Lamarr, one of the great sex symbols of all time, is making small talk with American film-score composer George Antheil . At the end of the evening, she exits quickly, scrawling her phone number in lipstick across the windshield of his car. The next day, he calls and she invites him to an intimate dinner at her Benedict Canyon retreat.
Hedy rallies the troops during World War II
(Picture from the 1991 Forbes article)
The prelude to a steamy Hollywood affair? Sorry, this is a business magazine. The pair talked about technology.
That night, over dinner, Lamarr and Antheil discussed the Nazi domination of Europe. Lamarr spoke from firsthand knowledge. Three years earlier she had fled Austria, largely out of dislike of her wealthy munitions tycoon husband, Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl.
But as an intelligent, sensitive person she also disliked the Nazis and all they stood for, and was glad to put an ocean between herself and Hitler.
As the evening wore on, Lamarr began outlining her idea for a sophisticated antijamming device for use in radio-controlled torpedoes. If this seems out of character for a 26-year old film beauty, the fact is that not only did Lamarr possess a first-class mind but she also had listened to her husband's dinner-table business discussions with customers for his armaments. After all, Fritz Mandl's Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik had supplied much of the equipment Benito Mussolini used when his troops invaded Ethiopia in 1935.
As Lamarr spoke that evening Antheil lay sprawled out on her living room floor diagramming her ideas in a spiral notebook. Two years later Lamarr and Antheil were awarded a U.S. patent for a 'secret communication system. '
The system devised by Lamarr and Antheil known as frequency hopping is now in extensive use in military communications. (This article was published in 1991, before the current explosion of spread-spectrum use in digital communications and cell phones, C.B.)
It works like this: A signal is broadcast over a seemingly random series of radio frequencies, hopping from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals. The signal could carry spoken words or commands for a torpedo. A receiver, hopping between frequencies in synchrony with the transmitter, picks up the message. Would- be eavesdroppers hear only unintelligible blips. Attempts to jam the signal succeed only at knocking out a few small bits of it. So effective is the concept that it is now the principal antijamming device used in the U.S. government's $25 billion Milstar defense communications satellite system.
Neither Lamarr nor Antheil ever received a nickel from their patent. Why? As an inventor Lamarr was decades ahead of her time. Frequency hopping, which was never implemented by the War Department, did not come into use until 1962, when Sylvania installed it on ships sent to blockade Cuba. That was three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent expired and the rights to the invention fell into the public domain .
"I can't understand," says Hedy Lamarr in her unmistakable soft and lilting Austrian-accented voice, "why there's no acknowledgment when it's used all over the world." While scarcely hurting, Lamarr could use the money (see below ).
Does the U.S. patent system, which grants a 17-year exclusive monopoly on inventions to patent holders, penalize forward-thinking inventors?
Hedy Lamarr, now 75, certainly isn't the first inventor to think so. Over the years, plenty of others have launched ideas well in advance of their full commercial potential, from the Wright brothers to less noteworthy inventors like Philo T. Famsworth, who was granted a patent for the electronically focused picture tube in 1930 . Ohio mathematician Marian Chew was granted a patent in 1969 for a simple method of testing automobile exhaust. Her test is now used in emissions inspections in 32 states; last year it was used over 100 million times. But Chew's patent expired in 1986, and she has never collected a cent in royalties. She has gone to court to try to get the state of Califomia to pay a royalty on tests it conducted between 1984 and 1986, but there are legal problems. A federal appeals court recently refused to hear her case on technical grounds.
Marian Chew, mathematician
There's a moral here: In technology, as in other lines of business, it isn't enough to have a good product; you have to be a hustler, too. Chester Carlson got rich from his invention of xerography only because he was willing to knock on more than 20 doors before a little Rochester company_later known as Xerox_acquired the technology. Gordon Gould waged a decades-long battle to win a patent for the laser he invented in 1957, finally winning in l987. The Patent Office's delay worked in his favor, since his invention, like Lamarr's, was ahead of its time. So far Gould has made nearly $10 million from his laser, with the patent not set to expire until 2004.
Philo Farnsworth, 20 years ahead of his time?
Lamarr, in contrast, was never a dogged advocate for her invention. She simply fumed it over to the government for use in fighting the Nazi menace and went back to plying her trade as a movie star.
In his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, Antheil credited the invention entirely to the screen star.
Here's the backdrop to the brainstorm. While her husband may have considered her merely decorative, Lamarr reamed a bit about weapons design during her three-year marriage to arms manufacturer Fritz Mandl. An idea stuck with her.
Naval attack ships frequently wasted multiple torpedoes on a single target when one might do. Good for hubby's business, bad for his customers. That's because unpredictable ocean currents, plus evasive actions by target ships, add up to many possible torpedo paths. One solution: radio-controlled torpedoes.
The idea sounded good but was impractical because radios are so easily jammed. But when Antheil credited the idea entirely to Lamarr, he was being somewhat modest. When Hedy Lamarr met Antheil at Janet Gaynor's dinner party, she met exactly the right person to help develop her idea. Before coming to Hollywood, where he scored films like The Plainsman and In a Lonely Place, Antheil had spent several years as an avant-garde composer. His offbeat Ballet Mecanique , performed in Paris in 1926, was scored for 16 synchronized player pianos, two electrically driven airplane propellers, four xylophones, four bass drums and a siren. When the first notes were struck, the wind from the propellers nearly blew listeners out of their seats.
Antheil understood instantly that synchronizing a series of split-second hops between radio frequencies would be no more difficult - than synchronizing player pianos. As a matter of fact, the patent specifies the use of slotted paper rolls_similar to piano rolls_to synchronize the jumps in frequency in the transmitter and receiver. The number of frequencies proposed 88_matches precisely the number of keys on a piano.
Perhaps as important as Antheil's assistance was a branch of the Commerce Department called the National Inventors Council. This was headed by Charles F. Kettering, research director for General Motors. The council was launched with much fanfare in 1940 to generate innovative ideas and inventions from the general public. Lamarr and Antheil sent in their idea in December 1940 and were subsequently encouraged to refine it into a patentable concept Over the years the council (which was phased out in 1974) generated over 625,000 suggestions and ideas from the public, though few became patents.
But neither Antheil nor Lamarr gave much thought to promoting their invention -it was, after all, their contribution to the war effort.
In fact, it wasn't until 1957, when the same concept was developed independently by a couple of engineers at Sylvania's Electronic System Division in Buffalo, N.Y., that frequency hopping found an application. It was the Sylvania device, operated electronically rather than with piano rolls, that ultimately became a staple of secure military communications. However, subsequent patents in frequency hopping do refer to the Lamarr/Antheil patent as the generic patent
Could Hedy Lamarr have played the patent game differently and eamed a pile of royalties? Possibly. The patent system is designed to protect intellectual property but also to get ideas off the drawing board and into the world.
Lamarr and Antheil basically ignored their patent once they solved their problem. Patent lawyers advise patenting improvements on an original concept as one way to extend patent protection beyond the original 17 year period.
Lamarr, six times divorced and now living in Miami on a Screen Actors Guild pension, can't help feeling she's been wronged "Never a letter, never a thank you, never money," she says. "I don't know. I guess they just take and forget about a person."
In her Hollywood days, Hedy Lamarr was often quoted as saying, "Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid." Glamorous she was, but stupid she wasn't.
The Sound of Lamarr
Refreshed after a swim in the pool at her apartment complex in Miami, Hedy Lamarr picked up her telephone and politely, but firmly, turned down a request for an interview in person. She also declined to let us send a photographer. "I still look good, though," she added during a lengthy phone chat.
Lamarr is hardly a recluse. She spends evenings playing cards with friends and watching movies on her VCR. " Jimmy Stewart just wrote me a picture card 'To a wonderful girl'it said. And Rex Reed wants me to go to a party with him tonight. He's in town."
The daughter of a prominent Viennese banker, Lamarr (nee Hedwig Kiesler) grew up a self-described enfant terrible. She gained notoriety while still a teenager for running through the woods naked in the 1933 Czech film 'Ecstasy' Shortly afterwards, she married wealthy arms manufacturer Fritz Mandl. They shared a 25-room hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps, were chauffeured around in one of nine cars and dined off gold plates. Lamarr broke off the marriage after three years. "I couldn't be an object," she says, sounding rebellious and spry at age 75, "so I walked out."
After abandoning Vienna in 1937, she met film mogul Louis B. Mayer in London. Mayer paid her S500 to sign a seven-year contract with MGM, shipped her to Hollywood and rechristened her Hedy Lamarr. At her peak, in the Forties, she earned as much as S250,000 a picture, starring in such films as White Cargo, Samson and Delilah and Comrade X , Over two decades, she appeared in 25 films, starring with such immartals as Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy.
In 1942 Lamarr patented an antijamming radio and gave it to the U.S. government as her contribution to the war effort. But her patent wasn't her only contribution. During the war, she raised $7 million in a single evening selling war bonds. She also pursued other ideas for inventions. Howard Hughes once lent her a pair of chemists to help her develop a bouillon-like cube which, when mixed with water, would create a soft drink similar to Coca- Cola. "It was a flop," she says with a laugh.
Over the years she married and divorced six husbands, a fact which, in the end, left her poorer. "You couldn't live with a person, in those days, without being married," she says. In a playful sendup of Greta Garbo's oft misquoted line,Lamarr who spoke to FORBES before Garbo's death last month, said, " I didn't vant to be alone."
Lamarr today lives comfortably, if not in grand style, in a one-bedroom apartment, supported by Social Security and a pension from the Screen Actors Guild. "I should probably sell my life story to Ted Turner," says the film goddess-inventor-patriot, "because it's unbelievable.".
Subject: AP Wire Story that went out yesterday
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 13:05:47 -0700 (MST)
From: Dave Hughes <dave@oldcolo.com> To: chris@ncafe.com
Hedy Lamarr-Inventor,
A sultry screen star who didn't just act _ she invented
AP Photo NY
335 of March 4
By ELIZABETH WEISE
AP Cyberspace Writer
The next time you pick up a cellular phone, give a brief thought to the improbable woman who first patented some of its underlying technology 55 years ago _ ''the most beautiful girl in the world,'' actress Hedy Lamarr.
The sultry, sophisticated brunette star of such hits as ''Samson and Delilah'' was the racy stuff of dreams for hundreds of thousands of men who marched off to war. But there's another side to this pinup image.
The pouting, sensuous star had an inquiring intellect and an engineering bent that in another era might have taken her not to Hollywood, but to MIT.
To trace the story of Lamarr's invention, it's necessary to hark back to 1933, when the Vienna-born 19-year-old _ already famous for her sexy film ''Ecstasy'' _ became the trophy wife of Austrian armament manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Mandl kept her by his side as he attended hundreds of dinners and meetings with arms developers, builders and buyers.
But the young Lamarr didn't just play the role of gracious hostess, she also listened and learned. After four years of marriage, with Mandl increasingly involved in deals with the Nazis, Lamarr knew she must escape.
She drugged the maid assigned to guard her, crawled out a window and made her way to London. There, she appeared on the stage, which led MGM's Louis B. Mayer to offer her a shot in Hollywood _ where she got a movie contract, a new name (she was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) and a new language.
But she didn't forget the immersion course she'd been given in advanced weaponry at the side of the first of her six husbands. Filled with an abiding hatred of the Nazis and a strong sense of patriotism for her adopted country, she searched for ways to help the war effort. In 1941, she met composer George Antheil at a Hollywood party. Dubbed ''the bad boy of music,'' Antheil composed avant-garde, mechanistic symphonies and ballets. ''Hedy didn't suffer fools gladly. George Antheil was not only a musician, but a formidable enough intellect that she could hold an intelligent conversation with him,'' said Dave Hughes, a Colorado researcher whose work for the National Science Foundation on wireless communication is based in part on the technology Lamarr envisioned more than a half-century ago.
Lamarr wanted to work at the newly established National Inventors Council in Washington, D.C., but was told she could do more for the fight against the Nazis by using her star status to sell war bonds.
But that wasn't enough for her. She was full of ideas, including one on the radio control of torpedoes.
She'd sat with Mandl as he reviewed films of field tests on torpedo systems, and now her mind began to explore ways to circumvent the jamming that kept the United States from using radio-controlled missiles against the Germans. As one of her sons, Anthony Loder, recalls, ''(She and Antheil) were sitting at the piano one day and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said
'Hey, look, we're talking to each other and we're changing all the time.' '' Together, they worked on the idea.
A simple radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to block. But what if the signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals?
Anyone trying to listen in or jam it would hear only random noise, like a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver where hopping in synch, the message would come through loud and clear.
The idea was Lamarr's, but Antheil, whose compositions had featured up to 14 player pianos playing simultaneously, suggested using piano rolls to make sure both sides were in synch. Their patent for a ''Secret Communication System'' was granted on Aug. 11, 1942.
''I read the patent,'' said Franklin Antonio, chief technical officer of the cellular phone maker Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego. ''You don't usually think of movie stars having brains, but she sure did.'' In fact, it was a brilliant idea _ so brilliant that it was years ahead of its time. The Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clockwork mechanism controlled by paper tape too cumbersome to be implemented.
It would take another 20 years, and the invention of the transistor, for the concept to be realized. Three years after the patent expired, the pair's ideas were used in secure military communication systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962.
But it was with the widespread availability of fast, cheap and small computer chips that spread spectrum really came into its own. It's still used by the military, including the U.S. government's Milstar defense communications satellite system, as well as for wireless Internet transmission and in many of the newer cellular phones. By an odd twist of fate, Lamarr's son Anthony owns a Los Angeles-based phone store. ''It's in every other phone system I sell,'' he said.
Anthony Loder has written a screenplay about what he sees as his mother's essentially tragic life. Neither she nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the commercialization of their patent, though it is cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology. Now 85, she lives simply and in seclusion in Florida.
''She's been forgotten. But she contributed so much to an older generation. A lot of men fell in love with her. And now the younger generation is benefiting from the unknown creative work that she did,'' her son said. But some of those men who fell in love with her looks turned into the men who also would make use of her ideas _ and fight to get her the recognition they feel she deserves.
Robert Price, an electrical engineer in Lexington, Mass., tried twice in the early 1980s _ first with a unsuccessful proposal for an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and then with a failed attempt to get her a Medal of Honor from Congress. Now Hughes, who champions the cause of a wireless Internet using the very spread spectrum Lamarr envisioned, is taking up the challenge.
''I was a 15-year-old fussing around with a crystal radio set just trying to get a signal in 1941 and, here she was, intellectually articulating a control mechanism for torpedo guidance systems!'' he said.
Hughes has launched a campaign to get Lamarr and Antheil honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award at its San Francisco convention on Wednesday. Although Antheil died in 1959 and Lamarr doesn't appear in public, Loder stands ready to fly to the ceremony should his mother be honored for her forward-thinking ideas so long ago. ''I haven't told her about it yet,'' he said. ''We'll see if she wins first.''
