I was just now moving files between my laptop and devices via their Bluetooth connections. This is so much faster and easier than fishing out and hooking up cables.
Bluetooth connections are a wonderful thing. Thank you Hedy* Lamar for inventing frequency hopping. I’m glad you’re getting the recognition you deserve, I just wish you could have lived to see it.
My search is weak, so I can’t find it. But the show Dark Matters-Twisted But True did a segment on Lamar. It was aptly titled Beauty And Brains.
That’s “Hedley!”
Drunk History did a great segment on Hedy Lamar.
IEEE does articles on her at frequent intervals. Brilliant woman.
I fully support this thread! Let’s also honor her by spelling her name correctly: it’s Hedy Lamarr.
PBS just had a special on her.
I think it was ‘American Experience’
Very interesting woman.
D’oh! I’ll see if I can get a mod to fix it.
Done. (Although I was sorely tempted to change the first name to Hedley.)
Mongo only pawn in the game of life.
Actually, there are many other pawns.
Without diminishing Lamarr’s mathematical contributions, I wanted to add that her partner in that particular endeavor was bad-boy composer George Antheil whose earlier extensive experiments with player piano rolls proved extremely relevant.
According to the Wikipedia page for August 11, today is the anniversary of the 1942 patent.
The idea that Hedy Lamarr made any significant contribution to the discovery of frequency-hopping is just silly. Although her name appears on the patent along with her husband George Antheil’s, it’s clear that her husband did the heavy lifting (Antheil had previous experience synchronizing multiple wind-up roll player pianos for his “Ballet mècanique”, which probably spurred the idea).
George Antheil was not any of her husbands, nor were they romantically attached in any way. Between her second and third marriages, she talked with Antheil about her idea of concealing a radio transmission using frequency-hopping. Antheil was more mechanically adept, so he came up with a way to do frequency-hopping using some machinery he’d already created for connecting player-pianos. The idea of frequency-hopping was Lamarr’s though. About the only way that you might slightly downplay her contribution to frequency-hopping is that years later other people came up with the same idea.
No. Several other frequency-hopping patents preceded Antheil’s:
More on the Lamarr myth is discussed here:
https://fracademic.com/dic.nsf/frwiki/766050
(translated) “The only problem is that when questioned about his brilliant invention, Hedy Lamarr has always claimed to have nothing to do with it, even if she gladly accepted the (very retroactive) prize awarded to her in 1997 by the American Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was Antheil, she said, who had had the idea, and who had associated her with the patent out of admiration for her, as he might have dedicated a symphony to her.”
Well if you can’t trust the Talk section of a Wikipedia article, who can you trust?