There is a sorority of celebrity sisters, that includes Paris, Britney, Lindsey, Jessica, Ashley, Miley, the Pussy Cat Dolls, The Spice Girls, the Wives of Orange County, or any woman that appears on a TV reality show, who may never be Rhodes scholars, (unless Oxford offers a doctorate in self-exploitation and public humiliation) but rest assured, they were not the first generation born to their breed. Celebrity and it vacousness has long been with us. It would be easy to dismiss the sorority as all being dumb blondes. I will let scientists debate if the peroxide in their bleaching kits has penetrated their craniums. They may have not made the world a better place to live, with the possible exception of Angelina Joie, or Elizabeth Taylor. Today’s sorority of celebrity sisters have focused their considerable talents on designing clothing lines, endorsing lingerie, fragrances, and promoting handbag collections. Good grief, even Steve McQueen patented “The Bucket Seat”. That being said, a book should never be judged by its cover. In 1933, actress, and yes, pioneer, Hedy Lamarr gained overnight international success. What did she do? She was in a film called “Ecstasy”. Her performance did not call for a lot of acting, what it called for was full frontal nudity, romping through the forest naked, baring her breasts in defiance, several scenes involving intercourse, and the first ever filmed scene of a female having an orgasm. This was not a film made at the Disney Studios, or the back lot at MGM. It was a foreign film, made in Czechoslovakia. For most filmgoers this was the first time that such candid activity was ever seen. It was shocking to the nth degree. The public went as they say, “ape %#?!” The film was banned in the US, although copies did get through customs. It was later re-edited with all the nude scenes deleted. (Yes, dull!) Despite a clamoring public, no decent theater even dared show the G rated version for fear of reprisal. The Catholic Leniency of Decency condemned it site unseen. It was deemed too corrupting to view. Hence, interest, and its profitability soared. Still pictures made the press, albeit with Ms. Lamarr’s private parts blacked out. Radio personalities like Father Coughlin, urged Americans to write to their state senators to demand censorship, and with that, a star was born. Hollywood called! Lamarr was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. The camera loved her. She could have cared less. Howard Hughes, JP Morgan, and both of the Rockefeller brothers vied for her attention. She had other fish to fry. Despite the controversy that launched her career, she went onto a respectable film career, “Boom Town“, “Comrade X“, “Ziegfeld Girl” and “Sampson and Delilah“ being among them. (She turned down the role of Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca“, and Paula Alquist in “Gaslight“, both roles went to second choice actress, Ingrid Bergman who won the Oscar for “Gaslight“.) The plots of Lamarr’s films always centered on her exotic beauty. Indeed, she was gorgeous. A natural beauty, when asked about her beauty, she blithely responded, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” Brilliant! It would be easy to remember Ms. Lamarr as just that, glamorous and stupid, indeed many historians have, but did you know that thanks to Lamarr we have “Frequency Hopping“, a form of electronic physics which helped to intercept radio jamming waves from the Germans and Japanese, and is the principal that during World War II (albeit late) was used for the torpedo guidance system. The principal was not new, but its application was. By the changing frequencies, i.e. “hopping”, frequencies would always be in synch. A constantly changing frequency cannot be jammed. To this day, it’s considered one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century. Flashback: Lamarr was once married to an arms merchant, Fritz Mandl. Mandl was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He was notorious for his lack of moral conscience. He was feared, obsessively jealous, and would sell weapons indiscriminately to the highest bidder. (He tried vainly to buy back every known copy of Ecstasy, which were burned.) Among his retinue of colleagues were Adolph Hitler, and Benito Mussolini. Yes, sometimes you are known by the company you keep. Lamarr was terrified of her husband, but as any good trophy wife, present for many of his meetings where they talked over strategy for the upcoming war. Lamar would sit there and look dumb. However, she was anything but. Lamarr was well educated, and from a socially progressive family. Lamarr was also Jewish. A sin that Hitler and Mussolini forgave her because of her beauty, and their reliance on her husband. (FYI Mussolini had a copy of "Ecstasy" in his archives) Lamarr clearly picked up a tremendous amount of technological and scientific information from Mandl during their marriage. Lamarr was also inadvertanly exposed to information so confidential, and private, concerning what was going on in Europe that her life was always in jeopardy. Fearing for her life, as Mandl was physically abusive; Lamarr actually had to drug a servant to escape their home. Their home was the Salzburg Castle, better known today as the castle in “The Sound of Music”. That’s a story for a rainy day. The story concerning how Lamarr came up with “frequency hopping” varies. However, this much seems reliable, Lamarr worked with friend, paramour, and experimental musician, George Antheil developing “Frequency Hoping”. The date was late in 1941. Lamarr and Antheil were at a party at the home of actress, Janet Gaynor, Gaynor was married to actor, Charles Farrell, they had was what was called a “Hollywood” marriage, meaning arranged, they were both reportedly gay/bisexual, and embraced by Lamarr who was publicly supportive of her gay colleagues. An anomaly in Hollywood in the 1940’s. But I digress, the Germans had advanced technology, they were winning the war, and fascism was on the rise. That evening while discussing the war, and what America might do to stop Hitler, the idea came to Lamarr, while Antheil was playing the piano. Antheil was a composer, providing orchestral music for many Hollywood films. He had just achieved some notoriety for an experimental symphony consisting of 18 player pianos. He was a self-proclaimed “bad-boy” of music. (Some girls go for those bad boys.) Antheil would play a set of several notes, and Lamarr would duplicate what he had just done, then he would “hop” one key, and replace it with another, then Lamarr would duplicate that. This became a kind of musical shorthand, a way to communicate. An intimate game between two lovers. The combinations were infinite. Antheil and Lamarr surmised that this same principal could be applied to radio waves. Antheil was well aware of the connection between music and mathematics. (See www.antheil.org for more info) Antheil was a brilliant theorist, with an unusual knowledge of musical theorems, (and by the way, a brilliant endocrinologist, who doesn‘t love glands?) so with the aid of a player piano (this is for real) they worked out a complicated system employing 88 variations (same number as there are on a piano key board) of frequency hopping. It took them several months of work. Here is a copy of their patent submitted on one of Antheil’s player piano rolls. Lamarr and Antheil offered their patented device to the U.S. military then at war with Germany and Japan. Their only goal was to stop the Nazis. Unfortunately, and predictably, the military establishment did not take a Hollywood actress or her novel invention seriously. Despite receiving a patent in 1942, for a “Secret Communication System”, (Duh!) their device was never really fully put in use during World War II. One can only imagine how many lives were unnecessarily lost as a result. The military did not understand the innovative technology, and simply refused to understand how the old-fashioned mechanics of a player piano could improve the accuracy of a torpedo. (Idiots!) A great patriot and in an effort to gain respectability, Lamarr wanted to join the newly established NIC, (National Inventors Council). The National Inventors Council was a governmental initiative to encourage America’s best minds to contribute freely to the war effort, but she was summarily turned away. She was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event by selling kisses for $50,000 a smack. (Oh mighty Isis!) Call it coincidence, but by the 1950's, no sooner had the patent on the device expired, when engineers at Sylvania "re-discovered" frequency hopping, but they called it "spread spectrum." A rose by any other name. These electronic devices were designed for use by the US military during the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960‘s. In 1966, Lamarr was given a lifetime achievement award for her contribution, to which she publicly replied “It’s about time!” (You go girl!) Ms. Lamarr never made a dime on her and Antheil's invention. Although she spent millions of her own dollars developing it. In 1996, she was awarded an EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Award, but was too frail to accept it. Her son, Anthony, accepted the award in her honor, noting that in a strange twist of fate, he was now running a small telephone, and electronics store where most of the product he sold was a direct result of his mother’s invention. Lamarr died in 2000, relatively poor, living on an actor’s pension. Her death was reduced to little more than a footnote, with mentions of her film work and her great beauty, but few failed to recognize her as one of America’s greatest inventors. 
Today, spread spectrum devices using microchips, make pagers, blue tooth, wi-fi, cell phones, guided missiles, and, yes, communication on the Internet possible. Many units can operate at once using the same frequencies. Most important, spread spectrum is the key element in anti-jamming devices used in the government's twenty five billion Milstar system. Milstar controls all the intercontinental missiles in U.S. weapons arsenal. This is all because of Lamarr (and Antheil’s) discovery._NRFPT_01.jpg)
