[SFDXA] Interesting Story

[Bill Marx]

 From the Tech Section of the Journal News September 9, 2002 (a Gannett Newspaper)

KEVIN MANEY
Commentary

Film star fought terror with wireless invention.
A year into the war on terror-ism, we need movie stars to go into their garages and invent enemy-whomping technology.

Beyonce Knowles, Angelina Jolie, Ben Affleck � surely someone like that will come up with a breakthrough that will help make America
�s foes react like those bugs that yelled �Raid!� in the TV commercials.

And then, after the war, the stars� inventions will no doubt change civilian life around the world.

After all, it happened before at a similar juncture in history. Well ...once. But it was very inspiring.

Sixty years ago, actress Hedy Lamarr; an Austrian-born hottie who�d met Hitler and did the first nude scene in a full-length
fea-ture film, was awarded a patent for radio technology intended to help American torpedoes blow up German ships.

Her invention forms the basis for just about all of today�s bur-geoning wireless communication technologies� digital cell phones,
802.11, satellite-guided smart bombs. Shocking, huh?

Not only is Lamarr�s contribu-tion real, it�s getting recognition in the National Women�s History Museum in Washington, D.C. And it
has won an award this year from that towering establishment of the nerd universe, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
En-gineers (IEEE).

Even now, though, it doesn�t seem that many people in tech re-alize what Lamarr did. �This re-ally sounds unbelievable to me!� Says
Bill Gross, founder of Ideal-ab, when asked about Lamarr.

Another prominent venture capitalist, who in fact invests mostly in wireless start-ups, con-fidently says, �I believe he is a holder
of many patents?� He?

Lamarr grew up as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna. At 19, she became internationally famous because of her nude swimming scene in
the Austrian film �Ecstasy� in 1933.

She married millionaire Aus-trian arms dealer Fritz Mandl, who regularly met with Adolph Hitler and Italian fascist Benito
Mussolini. Mandl often brought along Lamarr, and while the guys ogled her, she picked up a lot of hot tips on the latest advanced
weaponry.

She decided she hated the Nazis and her husband, too, so she escaped to London. Things get a little fuzzy at that point, but somehow
she met Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a movie contract, She moved to Hollywood and changed her name.

Lamarr became romantically involved with composer George Antheil. As the story goes, Lamarr was listening to Antheil play piano and
was thinking about how to make an anti-jam-ming radio control for torpedoes.

The constantly changing notes gave Lamarr an idea: Instead of sending radio control signals to a torpedo using one frequency, which
can easily be jammed or intercepted, send it over constant-ly changing frequencies in a pre-arranged pattern, like notes in a song.
If both the sending device and receiving device are synchronized the same pattern, they�ll be able to communicate. An enemy who
doesn�t know the pat-tern would never find the signal.

In that pre-electronic age, An-theil designed a mechanical play-er-piano-type device that would provide the pattern for the sender
and receiver. In 1942, Lamarr and Antheil were awarded patent 2,292,387 for their �Secret Com-munication System."

The Navy never used it, mostly because it wasn�t possible to squeeze a player-piano contrap-tion into a torpedo. After the war, the
concept of frequency hopping faded to black. No one did anything with it until engineers at Sylvania Electronics dusted off the
concept in 1957 and used transistors to make it work. It was first used on ships sent to block-ade Cuba during the 1962 missile
crisis.

Now the concept is called spread spectrum, and more than 1,000 spread spectrum patents have referred back to the Lamarr- Antheil
patent as the basis for the Technology. Qualcomm�s code di-vision multiple access (CDMA) Cell phone technology is based on spread
spectrum. So is high-
speed 802.11 wireless Internet access.

Turns out that the technology is good for more than just secrecy. It allows many times more de-vices to operate in the same radio
Spectrum without interfering with each other�s signals. Though my CDMA cell phone and yours op-erate in the same spectrum, they don�
t interfere with each other because they�re working off dif-ferent patterns of microsecond frequency changes.

Lamarr died in 2000, but by then wireless devices based on her idea had spread around the globe and changed the way peo-ple live and
work.

Lamarr�s story might inspire other stars to explore their inner inventor, unlocking a talent pool at this time when the nation needs
breakthroughs in engineer-ing and science.

I bet that�s what Britney Spears is really doing on her �break