Hedy Lamarr and the Secret Communication System

Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to a wealthy Jewish family. It was her mother, Gertrud, a pianist, who introduced her to the wonders of the stage. Hedy recalled,

«One day, mother promised me a nice present if I were good. The present was a visit, my first, to the theatre. I saw a stage play for the first time. I was thrilled and speechless. I don't remember the play, its title of anything about it. But I never forgot the general impression. School held but one interest from then on. I took part in school plays and festivals. My first big part came in Hansel and Gretel.»

 

The first film she saw that had the same effect on her was Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), released when she was thirteen. Although it received mixed critical reviews upon release, Metropolis is now considered one of the greatest and most influential films ever made.

 

Portraits of Hedy Lamarr at the age of six years old (circa 1920).

In the late 1920s, while taking acting classes in Vienna, Hedy found employment as a script clerk at Sascha-Film, Austria's largest production company at that time. Soon, she was cast by director Georg Jacoby in a small role as an extra in Money on the Street [Geld auf der Straße] (1930), the first sound picture made in Austria. In August 1931, she moved to Berlin, where she filmed The Trunks of Mr. O.F. [Die Koffer des Herrn O.F.] (1931) — starring iconic character actor Peter Lorre — and No Money Needed [Man braucht kein Geld] (1932), both of which were successful.

 

In early 1932, Hedy left Berlin to work on a film called Ecstasy [Ekstase] (1933), shot by renowned Czech director Gustav Machatý. Her role was that of a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who abandons her much older husband and has a passionate love affair with a virile engineer. Although hailed by some European critics as a «masterpiece,» the film was highly controversial upon release, as it included a nude scene and a close-up of Hedy's face in the throes of orgasm. As a result, Ecstasy was banned in Germany and in the United States, where it was condemned by the Hays Office as «highly, even dangerously, indecent.»

 

Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy. She was credited as «Hedy Kiesler,» her birth name.

The success and notoriety of Ecstasy led to more work for Hedy, notably in the comic operetta Sissi, about the life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. The play was acclaimed by critics, who described the young actress as «wonderful, tender and really attractive [...] a delightful Sissi.»

Playing the coveted role of Sissi confirmed Hedy Lamarr as a rising star in Vienna's film and theatre world, and brought her throngs of admirers. They sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. One such admirer was Friedrich «Fritz» Mandl, who diligently pursued Hedy throughout 1933. One night after Hedy's appearance in Sissi, Mandl showed up backstage and presented her with his card. Next, he appealed to her parents for their support in his marriage plans. The Kieslers gave their blessing, and the couple married in Vienna in August 1933. Mandl was 33 years old and Hedy was three months away from turning 19.

 

Fritz Mandl was one of Europe's most prominent military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer, who had close ties to the fascist government of Italy, as well as to the Nazi regime of Germany. According to Lamarr's alleged autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler attended Mandl's lavish parties at their castle home in Schwartau, Germany. As his wife, Hedy was forced to accompany Mandl to his business meetings with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences ultimately introduced her to the discipline of applied science and awakened her latent talent in the scientific field.

 

LEFT: Hedy Lamarr in costume for the play Sissi. RIGHT: Hedy Lamarr and Fritz Mandl.

 

By the time the United States entered World War II, Hedy Lamarr had divorced Mandl and become an established actress in Hollywood. She signed a contract with MGM in 1937 and quickly stunned audiences with performances in films such as Algiers (1938), her American debut, and Boom Town (1940), with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy.
 

Like so many other European émigrés working in Hollywood, Hedy threw herself into the war effort. Between filming, she served in the Hollywood Canteen, a club co-founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield that offered free food, dancing and entertainment for servicemen. Hedy remembered,

«I worked constantly at the Canteen and I worked hard. Some nights I signed so many autographs I thought my arm would drop off, but I couldn't resist those boys, and, in the end, I was able to dance with pleasure.»

She also actively participated in the national war bonds drive, taking part in the Stars of America tour with other actors, such as Greer Garson, Irene Dunne and Ronald Colman. Hedy visited sixteen cities in ten days and is credited with selling $25 million in bonds. However, she wanted to do more to help the war effort; she wanted to use her interest in science to aid in the fight against the Axis Powers.

 

LEFT: Hedy Lamarr signing autographs for servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen in 1943. RIGHT: Hedy Lamarr during a bond drive in Newark, New Jersey, in September 1942.

Although Hedy had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she dabble with various hobbies and ideas in her free time. These included a traffic stoplight, and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. During the war, she learned that the military had proposed radio-controlled torpedoes, but these could be easily jammed and rerouted by the enemy. Hedy thought there might be a way to prevent the torpedo's radio guidance system from being intercepted, and discussed her ideas with her friend, pianist George Antheil.

Hedy had previously explained to Antheil that she felt uncomfortable sitting in Hollywood when Europe was in such need. She told him that she knew a great deal about munitions and secret weapons, and was even considering leaving MGM and heading to Washington, D.C. to offer her services to the newly established National Inventors Council. Antheil suggested that she could do more for the war effort by staying in Hollywood, and the two soon started working on a frequency-hopping system, which they called «Secret Communication System.»

 

Antheil theorized that swift changes in radio frequencies could be coordinated just as he had done with pianos and several other instruments for Ballet Mécanique, a piece he had originally conceived as a soundtrack to the 1924 French surrealist film of the same name. Both Lamarr and Antheil agreed that a rapid changing frequency could not be detected and jammed by the enemy in a war scenario. If applied to radio-controlled torpedoes, as was their plan, the system could potentially help win the war. After many hours working together in Hedy's villa, they developed a mechanism that used player piano rolls to randomly change the signal sent between the control centre and the torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies, the number of keys on a piano. The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and the torpedo, thus creating an encrypted signal that would be too complex to be intercepted (scanning and jamming 88 frequencies would required too much power, making it nearly impossible for the enemy to do so).

In December 1940, Lamarr and Antheil sent a description of their ideas to the National Inventors Council and were encouraged by its chairman, Charles F. Kettering, research director of General Motors, to work towards a patent. While most of the initial proposal was patentable, a few of its clauses were too similar to other patented ideas and had to be altered. Samuel Stuart MacKeown, a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, helped them improve their invention, and the patent was granted on August 11, 1942. Lamarr is listed with her legal married name of Hedwig Kiesler Markey on the document.

 

Keeping with their determination to help with the war effort, Lamarr and Antheil proposed their invention to the U.S. Navy after they were granted the patent. The Navy, however, replied that the mechanism was unworkable and too bulky to fit inside the average torpedo. The «Secret Communication System» was subsequently classified as top secret and remained untouched for years.

In the 1950s, before the patent expired, engineers at the Hoffman Radio Corporation used the system (without the inventors' names) on equipment designed to communicate between aircraft and sonobuoys — cylindrical devices dropped from planes into the ocean to search for enemy submarines. In 1957, the concept was again adopted by engineers at the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division in Buffalo, New York to develop secure military communication mechanisms, but using electronics rather than player piano rolls. Although the system was commonly called frequency-hopping spread spectrum, its «official» name was CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). In 1962, three years after the patent expired, the invention had been further advanced and was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  

 

In 1985, the system was declassified for military use and quickly implemented within the emerging mobile telephone industry, since frequency-hopping technology allowed privacy for callers. By the late 1990s, variations of Lamarr and Antheil's invention were additionally being used in fax machines, alarms systems, military radios and global-positioning satellites. Their concept also became the basis of modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, as well as of anti-jamming applications, including the Milstar defense communications satellite system used by the United States.

Lamarr and Antheil went largely unrecognized for their invention during their lifetime. In early 1990, Forbes magazine interviewed Lamarr about the device and she told them,

«I can't understand why there's no acknowledgement when it's all used all over the world. [...] Never a letter, never a thank you, never money. I don't know. I guess they just take and forget about a person.»

 

On March 20, 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were finally, and officially, recognized for their invention with the Pioneer Award presented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Burlingame, California. Lamarr did not attend the event due to her declining health, but her son, Anthony (from her third marriage to actor John Loder), accepted the award on her behalf. Composer Charles Amirkhanian, who maintained the George Antheil Archive, accepted for Lamarr's late invention partner. In 2014, both Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

 

 

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SOURCES:
Barton, Ruth. Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film. The University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

Shearer, Stephen Michael. Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr. St. Martin's Press, 2010.