Most people in the technology business remember her from the 1998 lawsuit against COREL because of their unauthorised use of her likeness on the cover of CorelDRAW 8.However they have more reasons to remember her.
Née Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, she quickly became famous for her astonishing beauty. Max Reinhardt (the director, not the banker) called her "the most beautiful woman of Europe". What is not widely known is that "Hedy" was not only a wild spirit, but a mathematical talent as well.
When she was 20 years old, she starred in the "Symphonie der Liebe" or Ecstasy as the film became widely known. This film became famous for two scenes: Lamarr chasing her runaway horse naked, and a closeup of her face in orgasm (an expression which was achieved by her director pricking her with a needle).
Shortly after that film, the, notorious by now, Eva Kiesler married a fascist named Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer. The idiot sought to bind her in a golden cage, to keep her locked in his tower (in a future post I will return to comment on this kind of idiotic behaviour).Even though this was a cruel period in her life, it offered her the opportunity to come in contact with scientists and technicians in her husband's employ and thus become acquainted with the technical applications of mathematics.
Naturally, this state of thing was not to last and the wild Hedy fled away from her husband. In her autobiography it is written that while she was being chased by her husband's men, she sought refuge in a brothel. While she waited in an empty room, a customer walked in and Hedy had to have sex with him so as not to blow her cover. Even though the ghost writer of this book was later accused of taking too many liberties in its embellishment with fictitious incidents, it would not be something that the free-spirited girl would not do to secure her escape.
The rest of it is well known, since after her escape to America, via Paris and London, Hedy Kiesler (who adopted the name Lamarr in tribute to Barbara LaMarr) became a world-famous actress, starring in such blockbusters as Samson and Delilah.
Great actors and powerful figures went out of their way simply to admire her beauty, and she had several marriages, including a Texas oil magnate.
What was the twist in this fairytale life of a legendary bombshell?
Hedy Lamarr was a communications technologies genius innovator.
Indeed, in cooperation with Georg Antheil, who was conducting experiments on automated control of the frequencies of electronic musical instruments, Hedy Lamarr (as H. Markey, by the name of her second husband, Gene Markey) submitted the design and blueprints for a secure communications system ( Secret Communication System, U.S. Patent 2,292,387, 1942).
That patent proposes (very early considering the development of such technologies) the use of frequency-hopping (now an integral technique of spread-spectrum telecommunications) via a mechanism like a piano-roll. The proposed use was to make radio-guided torpedoes more reliable and impregnable to enemy interference.
Spread spectrum technology was declassified in the 80s and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) became available to meet the needs of more efficient bandwidth use (since signals do not "occupy" a part of the spectrum each) and of increased privacy for wireless communications.
However, no use was made of that system or of Hedy Lamarr's mathematical talents for the war effort.
Still the legacy remains. In her own words:
"Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever"
What a woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment