There was recently a documentary on the BBC (which I didn’t see) on Hedy Lemarr. Apart from her acting, the documentary also touched on the old story that she was in fact a rather good physicist, who patented, with George Antheil, a system for guiding torpedos.
Now, I know that her name was on a patent for “Secret Communications System”, that it was patent #2,292,387, and that the main premise was that guiding systems could be made more secure by hopping from frequency to frequency. However, the programme, apparantly, went on to add that this patent eventually became the basis for CDMA technology. I know that the origins of CDMA is shrouded in secrecy, what with it having first been developed for military use, but is there any direct link with Lamarr’s patent and CDMA?
I’ve been pointed to one online source which states that frequency hopping CDMA (FH-CDMA) is based somewhat on Lamarr’s patent (here), but I’m told (by someone in the field) that FH-CDMA is not really what most specialists would consider “true” CDMA.
So, what gives? Was Hedy Lamarr an actress by day, but a secret physics genius by night? Or have I got as much as anyone else knows in my post?
Lamarr worked on a system that involved frequency hopping spread spectrum. Direct sequence spread spectrum, like used in CDMA, works on different principles.
Tony Rothman, their interviewee, has the chapter on Lamarr and Antheil from his book online. It argues that the story as usually told is overblown and that even the idea of frequency hopping wasn’t particularly original, with the likes of SIGSALY predating them.
The David Kahn article he cites would probably be worth looking at.
Also in Blazing Saddles, a character whose name sounds very much like Hedy Lamarr had a sidekick, who in Dr. Stranglove, guided a nuclear missle. There’s gotta be something there!
Nitpick: It wasn’t a missile, it was a bomb. And Major Kong didn’t guide it: he released it from the bomb bay, then sat on it yelling something like “Yee hah!”
All I can add is that she is treated with great respect in IEEE publications written by people who know more about that particular item than I do. It might be the desire to have someone glamorous counted as an engineer, but I have never seen a real engineer say her work is all PR.
The jump from a frequency-hopping radio to CDMA is a big one. It would be like saying the person who invented the vacuum tube oscillator is responsible in a way for the latest Pentium microprocessor.
I’ve never heard of a link from Hedy to guiding torpedoes.
By the way, have you ever seen the film of Hedy swimming topless?
Fair enough. The reason I was interested, (and slightly skeptical) in this was a similar reason. I’m part of a women in physics email list, and someone had picked up this snippet on the TV, and posted it to the list in a kind of
I know that she’d patented the frequency hopping thing, but Bonzer’s link above, seems to suggest that whilst she’d had the idea, most of the technical know how was done by other people. It also seemed unlikely, that having made her first film at 17, she’d have had time to do a physics degree (not that that means anything). I was just attempting to get some hard facts so that the women on the email list didn’t kick up a huge fuss over nothing and end up looking a bit foolish.
That’s what I was led to believe, so I was naturally quite dubious when people on this email list started proclaiming that she was basically the person who invented the technology that underpins all modern mobile telecommunications.
Is that Extase? No I haven’t – it appears to be rather rare to get hold of (probably because her then husband tried to buy up every copy in existence!).
> Apart from her acting, the documentary also touched on the old story that she
> was in fact a rather good physicist, who patented, with George Antheil, a
> system for guiding torpedos.
Why do popularized versions of people’s stories (like the BBC documentary) insist on making wild distortions like this? Hedy Lamarr was not a physicist or an engineer. She didn’t even go to college. She may well have been extremely intelligent, but she had no advanced training in any science. What she did was make one brilliant suggestion when she was told about how the torpedo-guidance system worked.
