The other evening, my wife and I watched a program about Hedy Lamarr. If you don’t know who Hedy Lamarr was, you should. If you only know that she was an actress, while this is true, you do not know the most interesting and important part. She was also an inventor.
She was very intelligent, yet frustratingly she was more often than not type-cast into a life due to her glamorous appearance and this undoubtedly lead to some of her difficulties.
How big of an inventive contribution did she make to the world?….Well…If you are reading this, she is responsible for your ability to do so. Her concept of frequency hopping is used in almost all modern communication technologies. Wi-Fi, trunk radio, encrypted systems, etc., etc. It is used around the world.
The concept is that you have the transmitter and the receiver change frequencies in a predetermined sequence…and in synchronization with one another. For example, transmit on 3.0 MHz for a moment, switch to 3.2, then 2.8, then 4.0, back down to 2.5, and up to 5.0, etc….. and keep hopping around the dial throughout the message. You could even use part of the transmitted message to send a time stamp to maintain the synchronization between sender and recipient. This makes jamming or intercepting the message much more difficult. If you don’t know what the code pattern, timing, and sequence of frequency changes will be, well….you are out of luck. At best you might receive or jam a very tiny portion of the overall message being sent. Throw some error checking keys into the message, and the loss of one little portion will make no difference to the recipient. This was her idea, and with the help of composer George Antheil, who had experience synchronizing multiple groups of player pianos–a similar type of timing puzzle, they were able to turn the idea into a workable and patentable concept. It remained “Top Secret” during the war and for many years afterward. The two never were able to make any money from it–afterall, if it’s a secret, you aren’t going to know if it is being used…..by the time it wasn’t a secret, the opportunity to file a claim had long passed. Something about this is blatantly unfair….But at least, prior to her death, the story did come out and she was recognized for her stroke of genius.
I first learned of Hedy Lamarr not from the movies she starred in but instead thanks to an article I read in the early 1990’s. One had been published in Forbes, and another in a favorite magazine of mine: American Heritage of Invention and Technology. I can’t recall which issues it was printed in or where I first read the story, but I believe Forbes may have run it in 1990 and either Smithsonian or I&T may have run a similar story about this same time….and later I&T ran another article on her in 1997. But yes, in any event, I am enough of a nerd to have learned of a famous screen actress only because she invented something. Knowing what I know of her life, I’d like to think that she would have approved of this.
As for I&T, this magazine ran from 1985 until it ceased production in 2011. It was a great quarterly read. An industrial archaeologist’s delight. And I was a happy subscriber. This magazine had articles on the history of various inventions and their creators. From the mundane to the complex. A regular, last page column, was entitled “They’re Still There.” This segment featured a machine, or a device, process, or plant, that was continuing to do the job it was designed to do–even if it was already well over a hundred years old. Sometimes, in spite of technological advances, the old methods or old machinery cannot be replaced with anything better. It is most gratifying to see the examples of where someone simply got it right…so right that it still stands as a challenge for another to come up with a better way.
Another interesting feature of this magazine is that, at least for a long time, they only had one sponsor. (General Motors.) This resulted in only a few ads in the publication rather than being inundated with ads at every page. This lack of extraneous overt advertising made the magazine far more pleasant to read. (at least for me) …although this may have made it less pleasant for the business end of it.
Although this magazine is now defunct, there is an effort underway to try to resurrect it. I am also hoping that full, complete (including the images and diagrams), sets of back issues will one day be made available for sale again either in printed or digital form. (hint, hint! I’ll buy a set!) More information can be found here: https://ahsociety.org/content/invention-technology-magazine
If you can, throw some support their way….people need to know these stories and learn from them. And, let’s face it….I might want the opportunity to write a few too.