Amended from DailyWireless:
Columbia Journalism Review has a backgrounder on Hedy Lamarr and spread spectrum:
In 1940, the Austrian-born actress Hedy
Lamarr, considered by some the most beautiful woman in Hollywood,
approached her neighbor there, the avant-garde composer George Antheil,
and asked him a question about glands.
Antheil, known for his propulsive film scores
for multiple player pianos, had broad interests: in addition to his
music he wrote a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and had even
published a medical book, Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of
Glandular Endocrinology.
As the story goes, Lamarr — whose acting exploits (which include the
first big-screen nude scene) and marriages (there were six husbands,
most notably Fritz Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer with ties to Hitler
and Mussolini) are too varied to discuss here except to say that she
was a woman far ahead of her time — wanted to know how she might
enlarge her breasts. Somehow, though, they ended up talking about
radio-controlled torpedoes, and the future of communications was
changed.
After years of living with Mandl, Lamarr was
familiar with the problem of sending control signals to a torpedo after
it was launched from a ship, especially radio signals, which the enemy
could easily detect and jam. She had a notion of a radio transmission
that, by changing its frequency many times a second, could allow an
observation plane to
covertly guide a torpedo over long distances.
Combining Lamarr’s knowledge of radio control
with the model Antheil had used to coordinate sixteen pianos in his
BalletMécanique, the pair invented the idea of “frequency hopping,” and
obtained a patent for a Secret Communications System.
This was the first example of a single radio
transmission using multiple frequencies across the radio spectrum — the
range of electromagnetic frequencies that are useful for sending
broadcast signals — without bumping into other transmissions and
causing interference. Sixty-plus years later, frequency-hopping has
evolved into a technology, called “spread spectrum,” that proponents
claim could put an end to most forms of radio interference, presaging a
time when the airwaves (TV signals travel over the same spectrum), one
of our most heavily regulated resources, could be opened up.
The Inventor's Assistance League picks it up from there:
With the help of an electrical engineering
professor from the California Institute of Technology they ironed out
its bugs, and the patent was granted on August 11, 1942. It specified
that a high-altitude observiation plane could steer the torpedo from
above.
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 |
| Two
pages of drawings from Lamarr and Antheil's patent. Note the
player-piano-like slotted paper on the second sheet. Markey is the name
of Hedy Lamarr's second of six husbands. |
Entire article location |
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