Hedy's birthday!

Once upon a time, Hedy Lamarr incarnated the wicked temptress in movies such as Samson and Delilah. She debuted very young, making films in her native German tongue, but after a failed marriage and a rather spectacular escape from her fascist husband that included drugging him and fleeing into the night, she ended up in America.





She was a very hard working actress – in the years between 1940 and 1949, she made no less than 18 movies. She also had two children, and together with friend George Antheil she invented something that we still benefit from. See, Hedy wasn’t just a pretty face, she also possessed considerable mathematical talent and she and George Antheil, as their own personal contribution to the allied forces, invented an early version of frequency hopping. It actually used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. It was never used at the time, but it was implemented in the USA in 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba.

But time would put Lamarr’s and Antheil’s ideas to better use – today they serve as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in WiFi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Kinda like an example of how to turn swords into ploughshares. Or, considering how much sex related stuff that probably passes through WiFi-connections on a an odrinary Thursday, a practical example of using technical innovations to make love not war.

Either way, Hedy was a pretty remarkable lady and I figured she deserved a shout-out on what would’ve been her 96th birthday.