It has been suggested that the short-range wireless protocol known as Bluetooth should instead have been called Lamarr, in honor of the actress/inventor Hedy Lamar.
Hedy (maiden name Kiesler) was born in Vienna in 1914. From her early childhood she was fascinated by acting–and she was also very interested in how things worked, an interest which was encouraged by her bank-director father. She began acting professionally in the late 1920s, and gained fame and notoriety when she appeared–briefly nude–in the film Ecstasy. It was followed by the more respectable Sissy, in which she played the Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
In 1933, Hedy married the arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl, finding him charming and fascinating and also probably influenced by his vast wealth. She was soon turned off by his Fascist connections and his extremely controlling nature–rather ridiculously, he even tried to buy up all copies and negatives of Ecstasy. He did not allow her to pursue her acting career, but did require her to participate, mainly as eye-candy, in high level meetings with German and Italian political leaders and with people involved in military technology. What she heard at these sessions both interested and alarmed her.
Finding her marriage intolerable and the political situation in her country disturbing, Hedy left and first came to London. There she met MGM head Louis B Mayer, who offered her an acting job at $125/week. She turned down the offer, but booked herself onto the same transatlantic liner as Mayer, bound for the USA. On shipboard, she impressed him enough to receive a $500/week contract. He told her that a name change would be desirable, and she settled on “Lamarr”…the sea.
With the outbreak of war in Europe, Hedy followed the news closely. For reasons that are not totally clear, she began thinking about the problems of torpedo guidance: the ability to correct the weapon’s course on its way to the target would clearly improve the odds of a hit. She had heard the possibility of a wire-guided torpedo discussed over dinner at Mandl’s…but this approach had limitations. Radio was an obvious alternative, but how to prevent jamming?
As an anti-jamming technique, she hit on the idea of having the transmitter and the receiver change frequencies simultaneously and continuously…she may have been inspired partly by the remote-control radio receiver which was available at the time, possibly either she owned one or had seen one at somebody else’s home. With synchronized frequency changes at both ends of the radio link, jamming would be impossible unless an enemy knew and could emulate the exact pattern of the changes. But how to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver?
Enter Hedy’s friend George Antheil, who called himself “the bad boy of American music.” Antheil was fascinated by player pianos and had created and performed compositions which depended on simultaneous operation of several of these players. Maybe the punched paper strips used by player pianos could provide a solution to the frequency-hopping problem?
US Patent 2282387, issued to Hedy Kiesler Markey (the name reflecting a brief unsuccessful marriage) and George Antheil, implemented this approach. The feeding of the paper strip on the launching ship and that inside the torpedo would be started simultaneously, and the holes in the strips would select the frequencies to be used at any given time…88 rows are mentioned, offering 88 frequency choices, but obviously this number could be smaller or larger. Commands to the rudder of the torpedo would be sent via modulation of a carrier wave on the always-changing frequency selected. (The two inventors had retained an electrical engineer to assist with specification of some of the details.)
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