The Ecstasy of Ada Lovelace Day

Here it is again—Ada Lovelace Day, a global celebration of women in science and technology, past and present. (A nice change from the subject of women being in the literal and figurative crosshairs for displaying any reasoning skills beyond those required to work out a recipe for stew or darning a sock.)

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.