SALON

Monday, Nov 28, 2011 1:00 AM UTC

“Hedy’s Folly”: The movie star behind your cellphone

How Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman in the world, invented a technology we use every day

By

Topics: What to Read, Books, Hedy Lamarr, Richard Rhodes, Biography,

Hedy Lamar

In the summer of 1940, George Antheil, an avant-garde composer trying to make it in Hollywood, was invited to a dinner party at the request of the most beautiful woman in the world. She, a movie star, wanted to talk to him about her breasts: Did he think they could they be made any larger? She sought out this improbable consultation on the authority of several articles Antheil had written for Esquire magazine applying his supposed knowledge of endocrinology to such questions as whether one’s wife had been unfaithful and “which girls will and which girls won’t.”

Antheil was properly dazzled by the introduction. He later wrote that his “eyeballs sizzled” upon meeting Hedy Lamarr and that she was even better-looking in real life than on film. The question of the actress’ breasts seems to have been dropped shortly thereafter, but the two did wind up collaborating on an unlikely project meant to support the Allied war effort: inventing a process by which remote-controlled torpedoes could evade signal-jamming attempts by the enemy. This process, which was patented, is essential to much of the wireless and cellular communications technology we use today.

Richard Rhodes’ new book, “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” is the first book-length attempt to rescue this odd and marvelous story from the dustbin of history. Because the U.S. Navy at first declined to implement their patent and then later revived it under still-undisclosed circumstances — apparently without either Lamarr or Antheil knowing about it — the pair’s contribution has been obscured. Antheil died in 1959, but Lamarr, who lived until 2000, recognized her concept in later technological developments and sometimes pointed it out.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Keisler, to a family of assimilated Jews in Vienna, Lamarr was the adored child of a father who loved to tell her how things worked. She left school at the age of 16 to become an actress. (Her first director decreed her “the most beautiful girl in the world,” a epithet later picked up by Hollywood publicists.) At 19, she starred in a film “Ekstase” (“Ecstasy”) that featured blurry shots of her swimming and running through the woods in the nude, making herself mildly notorious. The same year, fatefully, she married Friedrich “Fritz” Mandel, a rich, powerful and charismatic arms manufacturer 13 years her senior.

Almost immediately, she realized her mistake. Controlling and jealous, Mandel tried to buy and destroy every copy of “Ekstase” and forbade his trophy wife from any further acting. Lamarr would later recall being “watched and guarded and followed night and day.” She described her escape from the marriage and, ultimately, to America, as just that, a flight in the dead of night from a “beautiful, jeweled case.”

Before she left, however, Lamarr spent plenty of time soaking up the conversation around her husband’s dinner table. His guests were fellow weapons designers and manufacturers with right-wing connections, men who did not realize just how much she understood. Lamarr’s famous, caustic advice to women who wanted to be glamorous was to “stand still and look stupid,” and the same trick surely came in handy when she wanted people to underestimate her.

Rhodes characterizes Lamarr as an “inventor,” rather than an engineer or scientist. She set up a little workshop in her Hollywood home, and between films she tinkered on an assortment of projects. Howard Hughes once sent over a couple of chemists to help her with a scheme to concoct a dehydrated soft drink. For her more martial ideas, she enlisted Antheil — who’d spent much of the 1920s in Paris rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ezra Pound and Man Ray — because he’d once worked as a weapons inspector in an armory. They also collaborated on a method to detonate missiles that just miss their airborne targets.

Antheil turned out to be a particularly fortuitous choice for the torpedo guidance system because his most famous composition, “Ballet Mechanique,” not only provoked a riot when it was first performed in 1925, but also featured 16 synchronized player pianos. Together, starting from Lamarr’s idea, they devised a pre-digital way to synchronize a radio transmitter and a receiver so that they can simultaneously switch from frequency to frequency while communicating a message. Signals transmitted on a single frequency can be easily located and jammed, but not a signal that is jumping randomly among, say, a few dozen different frequencies. (This technique, which Lamarr dubbed “frequency hopping,” is now subsumed within the broader term “spread spectrum.”)

The Navy buried the patent for various complex reasons, but Lamarr and Antheil’s invention was eventually dusted off and employed in a variety of military and civilian communications systems during the 1950s and onward. (If you use Bluetooth devices, you use frequency hopping.) For a while, the actress and the composer had more or less forgotten the patent, which expired in 1959. Later, Lamarr would occasionally complain to the press, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that she found a champion in Dave Hughes, a longtime member of the online community the Well (now owned by Salon). He brought her achievement to wider awareness and, in 1997, she received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1986 book, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” unites the social history of Vienna, the classic era of Hollywood film, Paris in the ’20s, experimental music, weapons design, the niceties of patent law and the technology of information transmission — a real grab bag of elements — in this short, charming and remarkably seamless book. He makes a rigorous effort to establish exactly what Lamarr contributed, rescuing the truth from both belittlers (Antheil himself vacillated between giving her credit and making patronizing remarks about the notions in her “beautiful, beringleted head”) and Hedyolators.

Rhodes titled the book “Hedy’s Folly” in part because her contemporaries regarded Lamarr’s inventing as entirely superfluous to her career as a star and in part because she dared to believe that her creation would be welcomed by the Navy. It was an institution, as Rhodes puts it, unlikely to be “prepared to take correction from a Hollywood actress … in a matter about which it was not prepared to listen to its own submarine commanders.” In the end, she used her fame to raise millions of dollars for war bonds instead. “She deserved better,” Rhodes writes, than to be judged by that spectacular face alone, and now, at last, she is.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • A missing poster hangs on a tree outside the Cleveland home of Amanda Berry Wednesday. Berry and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, made a daring escape this week after being held captive for more than a decade.
    Credit: AP/Tony Dejak

  • Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje offer their best impression of  Eric B. & Rakim. On Thursday, New York prosecutors identified the pair as members of an international gang that robbed $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining ATM machines around the world.
    Credit: AP

  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks to a podium during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Technology Enhanced Accelerated Learning Center at Essex County Newark Tech in Newark, N.J., Tuesday. Christie made less flattering headlines this week after undergoing a secret stomach surgery to curb his weight.
    Credit: AP/Julio Cortez

  • Workers stand outside the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday after a fire broke out in its 11-story building. Eight people were killed in the blaze.
    Credit: AP/Ismail Ferdous

  • Workers rescue a woman trapped for 17 days in the rubble of a garment factory building in Saver, Bangladesh, Friday. The building's collapse was the worst industrial disaster in the country's history, killing more than 1,000 people.
    Credit: AP

  • Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gives his victory speech Tuesday in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., after winning back his old congressional seat in the state's first district.
    Credit: AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

  • Jodi Arias reacts in Maricopa Country Superior Court Wednesday after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the gruesome killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Arias has subsequently said she wants the death penalty, claiming she'd "prefer to die sooner than later."
    Credit: AP/The Arizona Republic/Rob Schumacher

  • Ariel Castro stands for his mug shot Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, where he is being held on $8 million bail. The former bus driver is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a period of 10 years.
    Credit: AP/Cuyahoga County

  • Charles Ramsey addresses the media Monday after helping rescue three women held captive in Cleveland for more than a decade. Ramsey's hero portraiture has been complicated by revelations of his own domestic violence record.
    Credit: AP/The Plain Dealer/Scott Shaw

  • Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The military branch was rocked this week after its chief sexual assault prevention officer was charged with sexual battery.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 42 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations