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Hedy Lamarr: World War Ii
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Hedy Lamarr was a famous movie actress in the 1930's. She ... held a patent on technology which is the foundation for today's advanced wireless networks. Lamarr's had an idea for frequency hopping: switching from frequency to frequency in split-second intervals. Lamarr's idea, combined with a friend's idea of a device allowing the frequency to be synchronized, created technology that was used to effectively in World War II and has led to today's wireless networks.
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Lamarr's role in developing a technology that has enjoyed widespread military and civilian uses grew out of her personal experiences in Austria before the outbreak of World War II. Married from 1933 to 1937 to an Austrian arms maker, Lamarr got what amounted to a four-year-long education in munitions manufacturing. With Nazi Germany's influence growing in both her husband's business and in her native country, she decided to flee and wound up in Hollywood.
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Lamarr's contributions to the United States' war effort weren't just movies, pin up girl pictures and selling war bonds. She learned engineering principles from the munitions experts of the World War II era. While listening and watching munitions customers at her ex-husband's side, she had devised a method of blocking the signal jamming signals used by the German army against the American radio-controlled missiles.
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In 1942, Lamarr and American composer George Antheil devised a plan to help the war effort during World War II. They developed a sophisticated, anti-jamming device for use in radio-controlled torpedoes. This method of radio “frequency hopping” could prevent enemy spies from intercepting the U.S. Military’s messages. They received a patent for it, Patent Number 2,292,387. Their invention turned out to be more useful in later military tactics after World War II, particularly during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when it was installed on ships as part of a blockade on Cuba. Their patent expired in 1960 though and so they received none of the profits and little recognition. Since the 1960's, the method has been used extensively in military communications.
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The EFF's Pioneer Award honors Lamarr, 84, for her creation of the concept of frequency hopping - now known as spread-spectrum broadcasting. Lamarr developed the idea during World War II in an attempt to help the US military foil signal jamming that made the use of radio-controlled torpedoes against the Germans impossible. The idea was that while transmissions over a single frequency were easy to block, transmissions jumping from frequency to frequency would be difficult to detect, much less intercept and jam.
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