Lovelace (1815-1852) was the only legitimate child
of Lord Byron, and had a flair for mathematics that led her to a key
partnership with Charles Babbage’s proto-computer. She might be considered the
Mother of Machine Languages and is certainly well qualified to provide a hook
for a day of recognition of the achievements of other scientifically-minded
women.
In past ALD posts, I’ve discussed Admiral
Grace Hopper, the mother of modern computing languages
(including inventing the term “debugging” for the process of fixing logic
errors); Rosalyn
Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine for her work in developing radioimumunoassay (RIA);and Joan
Strothers Curran, a physicist who invented the
radar-deflecting countermeasure known as “window” or “chaff”, which played a
key role in confusing the Germans about the intended D-Day invasion location.
All these women devoted their lives as well as their
careers to technology advancement and scientific inquiry. My subject
today…well, not so much.
But still.
Were it not for Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Mandl
Markey Loder Stauffer Lee Boies, you might not be hauling out your Verizon
smartphone to Google who the hell this person is. She and her inventing
partner, composer George Antheil, were granted the patent for frequency-hopping
“secret communication system” on which many wireless communications systems are
based.
Ah, forget the Google search: I’m talking about Hedy
Lamarr. (And it’s interesting to me that in writing this, apparently
Microsoft Word spellcheck doesn’t recognize either name. Seriously? WTH?)
Lamarr is better known as a movie star—from back in
the days when a star was a studio product—than an inventor. She started out in
her native Austria, was “discovered” by Louis B. Mayer and brought to
Hollywood in the 1930s. She took to the glamorous life and bought into MGM’s
publicity about her very early on. As far as I can tell, after reading a couple
of bios about her, she couldn’t get enough money or adulation.
But she also had a bright mind, and she apparently
picked up a lot of bits and bobs from the conversation at social events
hosted by her first husband, arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. Guests at that
table included high-ranking Nazis and table talk often turned to business of what’s nowadays referred to as C3—command, control and communications.
In 1940, Lamarr was kicking things around with a
Beverley Hills neighbor, Anteil—an avant garde composer known for mechanistic
pieces that involved (among other things) coordinating multiple player pianos.
Lamarr was primarily interested in the possibilities that glands might hold for
enlarging her breasts, but somehow the conversation turned to radio-controlled
torpedoes—as, of course, it would.
Lamarr had an idea for what she called “frequency
hopping”—moving the control commands around the broadcast spectrum in such a
way that the enemy couldn’t jam the signal. Antheil proposed that the rapid
frequency changes could be managed the same way he’d coordinated his player
pianos in his “Ballet Méchanique”.
The patent for this protocol was granted in 1942,
but wasn’t applied to weapons during WWII. In 1957 those crazy guys at Sylvania
Electronic Systems translated the player piano rolls as programming media to
electronics as a basis for secure communications. The technology was used by US
vessels during the 1962 Cuban blockade; but by that time the patent had
expired.
However, the story didn’t end there. The
Lamarr-Antheil concept is the basis for modern spread-spectrum communications
technology, enabling signals to mostly bounce around the spectrum and allowing us to enjoy incredibly banal conversations shouted into mobile phones and dodge texters staring into their hands on sidewalks of pretty much every
country on the planet.
Lamarr didn’t earn anything from the patent, which
probably really ate her lunch. (She had an unquenchable greed and kept a lot
of lawyers busy, though not necessarily in the chips. She filed lawsuits the
way most people file paystubs, but did not like paying for legal or any other
services. Her six husbands in particular discovered that she was high
maintenance in every sense of the term.)
As a human being, I wouldn’t rate her particularly
well. And as a technologist, she was a dilettante. But, for one brief moment,
she crystalized overheard conversations, found just the person who could
deliver a practical application, and gave us communications capability that
has forever changed the way we connect with one another.
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