Inventor

The most beautiful girl in the world

Born Hedwig Keisler, Austria, 1913. By age of 20 become a movie star married an arms manufacturer.

Escape from fascism

Gifted in mathematics, Hedy listened and learned from her husbands dinner party guests. Her husband, although partly Jewish, provided arms for the Italian Fascists invasion of Ethiopia. He was also a jealous man, trying to destroy prints of her movies. Hedy, a Jew, escaped from fascism and her husband in 1937, settling in the United States.

George Antheil
Now a Hollywood movie star, Hedy met composer George Antheil at a dinner party. Topic of converstation: Navy torpedoes!

Radio controlled torpedoes

The problem: Allied torpedoes were very inaccurate. The solution: Radio controlled torpedoes. The next problem: Radio signals would be very easy for the enemy to jam.

Frequency hopping
Lamarr and Antheils solution to the problem
Modeled on a player piano.

88 Keys, 88 Frequencies
player piano has a program. A specific sequence of keys 88 keys in a keyboard
A

Lamarr and Antheils idea: The frequency of the torpedos radio reciever and the controlling transmitter would switch repeatedly, but remain synchronized with each other. The synchronization is maintained by a pair of identical piano rolls, one in the torpedo and one in the controller.

You want to put a piano into a torpedo?

Lamarr and Antheil offered their invention to the Navy. However, frequency hopping was not used in Word War II.

Years later

The Navy reinvented frequency hopping in 1957. Lamarr and Antheils patent had expired. Antheil gave Lamarr all the credit for their invention. Frequency hopping was used by the Navy in the Cuban Missle Crisis in 1962. Hedy Lamarr passed away in 2000. Today, frequency hopping is the basis of spread spectrum technology, used for Bluetooth, WiFi, cordless phone technology, and other devices.