IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 17

U.S. Navy. During WWII, another idea for a magnetic
proximity fuse is credited by Rhodes for saving thousands of lives. As for Hedy herself, she was to wait
until 1997 to be recognized for her unique contribution to the Allied war effort.
Rhodes has past success in making complex science and its social implications clear to a lay reader.
He is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
which makes accessible nuclear weapon technology
as well as the espionage of the 1950s. In Hedy's Folly
he aims to show us how the independent tinkerer -
the non-scientist who brainstorms with a like-minded
person (think Jobs and Wozniak ) - can find a new
solution to an old problem. Even late in life, Lamarr
proposed a device to help the disabled move themselves out of bed as well as an improved design for the
Concorde SST jet.
Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Kiesler) was born into a
prominent Jewish family in Vienna in 1913. Her father
was a successful banker. She was a pianist and actress
from an early age. She left school at sixteen to audition for Max Reinhart's stage company and then went
to Berlin for film roles. At nineteen she married the
persistent Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer who
supplied weapons to many nations, including opponents. Mr. Rhodes speculates that Hedy learned much
by keeping her ears open at the dinner table, since
Mandl's guests were often members of the military.
As it turned out, much could be learned by standing
still and looking stupid.
She fled the possessive Mandl and made her way
to Hollywood, which welcomed her partly because
she created a sensation, appearing nude at seventeen in a film called Ecstasie. In the movie, she was
shown swimming solo in a forest pond and then fleeing from a potential lover. It was banned in some
places, which meant that the studios had no problem
publicizing her films. She was perpetually cast as a
femme fatale, as in Cecil B. De Mille's biblical epic
Samson and Delilah.
Hedy's s tinkerer's instincts came partly from
her stimulating collaborators, some of whom who
had experience in reducing ideas to practical applications. During her rise, she made many influential
and talented friends who flourished in 1930s Vienna
and Paris. Chief among these was George Antheil,
an American composer and polymath, who had created his own sensation in Paris with his eclectic Ballet Mécanique which is scored for pianos, percussion,
electric buzzers, and airplane propellers.
Reception to the ballet was sharply divided. But
what interested Lamarr about Antheil's ballet - and
also caught the attention of Harry Hopkins' wartime
National Inventors Council - was Antheil's programming of sixteen player pianos, controlled from a central console. This configuration fulfilled the basic
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

model of a synchronized sender and receiver - which
embodied Lamarr's idea for a guided torpedo, controlled by frequency-hopping radio signals that might
avoid enemy jamming.
Lamarr's immediate concern, the reason she was
thinking about torpedoes at all, was the sinking of
The City of Benares, a transport carrying 90 school
children from England to Canada (only 13 survived).
Rhodes adds that the Nazi annexation of Lamarr's
native Austria in 1939 was another motive.
With Antheil's loyal support, Lamarr secured a
patent based on her idea for an anti-jamming system
and his demonstration of how such an anti-submarine
torpedo might work. They got their patent, and its
basic idea was submitted to the Navy for approval.
Despite the enthusiasm for Lamarr's idea from the
U.S. National Council of Inventors - which included
Charles Kettering, the inventor of the electric selfstarter, and Thomas Midgely, Jr., who had co-invented
Freon - Lamarr's invention was shelved by the Navy.
This despite the support of eminent inventors and the
national priority FDR had assigned to the Council
during wartime.
Rhodes invites us to speculate on how Navy
bureaucracy may have scuttled Lamarr's invention.
Did the Navy read the Lamarr/Antheil proposal all
the way through? Rhodes believes, as did Antheil, that
the Navy only read the document as far as the player
piano section - which Antheil intended as a metaphor.
Antheil believed his proposal was interpreted as a
piano-sized control mechanism housed in a torpedo.
The professional partnership was not perfect;
Lamarr was making money and was much in demand,
which made Antheil resentful. In turn she accused
him of taking credit for their invention, of presenting
himself as the more technical-minded of the two. He
denied it, but one can imagine a nudge-nudge moment
when Antheil implied to the Inventors Council that a
Hollywood star and a woman no less, couldn't possibly be taken seriously, as least without his help. But
Rhodes only hints at sexism.
Guided bombs had been around for a long time.
The German air force had developed a "glide bomb"
that could be guided by radio from a plane. Rhodes
notes that it had limitations, one being that the plane
tended to overtake the bomb. In 1936 Lamarr had met
Hellmuth Walter on at a Christmas Party arranged at
her husband's munitions factory; Walter described
his invention of a "wakeless" torpedo that ran below
the surface, powered by hydrogen peroxide. But it
was limited in range, guided by the payout of an
attached wire. Lamaar's improvement was to amend
the path of the torpedo, made possible via "frequency hopping," a strategy of constantly changing
radio frequencies so that they could not be jammed
by an enemy. Lamarr and Antheil, in using broad
|

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014