-The most popular movie
in 1933 was King Kong. But everyone in Hollywood was talking about that
scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.
-Louis B. Mayer, of the
giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
The film was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more
popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at
any price.
-The star of the film,
called Ecstasy, was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of her beauty
was "to stand there and look stupid." In reality, Kiesler was
anything but stupid. She was a genius. She'd grown up as the
only child of a prominent Jewish banker. She was a math
prodigy. She excelled at science. As she grew
older, she became ruthless, using all the power her body and mind
gave her.
-Between the sexual
roles she played, her tremendous beauty, and the power of her
intellect, Kiesler would confound the men in her life including her six
husbands, two of the most ruthless dictators of the 20th century, and one of
the greatest movie producers in history.
-Her beauty made her rich
for a time. She is said to have made - and spent - $30
million in her life.
-But her greatest
accomplishment resulted from her intellect, and her invention continues to
shape the world we live in today.
-You see, this young Austrian starlet would take one of the most valuable
technologies ever developed right from under Hitler's nose. After fleeing
to America, she not only became a major Hollywood star, her name sits
on one of the most important patents ever granted by the U.S. Patent Office.
An insight into, why she
was what she was..
-At the time she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the
richest men in Austria. Friedrich Mandl was Austria 's leading arms maker. His
firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis.
-Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business
dinners with representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist
forces. One of Mandl's favorite topics at these gatherings - which included
meals with Hitler and Mussolini - was the technology surrounding
radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes.
-Wireless weapons offered far greater ranges than the wire-controlled
alternatives that prevailed at the time.
Developing the
technology..
But Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about
making movies. At the height of her fame, in
1942, she developed a new kind of communications system,
optimized for sending coded messages that couldn't be "jammed."
She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and
guided bombs to always reach their targets. She was
building a system to kill Nazis.
By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the
kind of single-frequency radio-controlled technology Kiesler's ex-husband
had been peddling. The drawback of this technology was that
the enemy could find the appropriate frequency and "jam"
or intercept the signal, thereby interfering with the missile's intended
path.
Kiesler's key innovation was to "change the channel."
It was a way of encoding a message across a broad area of the
wireless spectrum. If one part of the spectrum was jammed, the
message would still get through on one of the other frequencies being
used. The problem was, she could not figure out how
to synchronize the frequency changes on both the receiver and the
transmitter. To solve the problem, she turned to perhaps
the world's first techno-musician, George Anthiel.
Anthiel was an acquaintance of Kiesler who achieved some notoriety
for creating intricate musical compositions. He synchronized his
melodies across twelve player pianos, producing stereophonic sounds no
one had ever heard before. Kiesler incorporated Anthiel's technology
for synchronizing his player pianos. Then, she was able
to synchronize the frequency changes between a weapon's receiver and its
transmitter.
On August 11, 1942, US Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil
and "Hedy Kiesler Markey," which was Kiesler's married name at the
time.
How she continues to
be an inspiration..
Most of you won't recognize the name Kiesler. And no one
would remember the name Hedy Markey. But it's a fair bet that
anyone reading this of a certain age will remember one of the great
beauties of Hollywood's golden age - Hedy Lamarr.
That's the name Louis B Mayer gave to his prize actress.
That's the name his movie company made famous.
Meanwhile, almost no one knows Hedwig Kiesler – aka Hedy
Lamarr - was one of the great pioneers of wireless communications. Her
technology was developed by the U.S.Navy, which has used it ever since.
You are probably using Lamarr's technology, too. Her
patent sits at the foundation of "spread spectrum technology,"
which you use every day when you log on to a wi-fi network or make calls
with your Bluetooth-enabled phone. It lies at the heart of the
massive investments being made right now in so-called fourth-generation
"LTE" wireless technology. This next generation of cell
phones and cell towers will provide tremendous increases to wireless network
speed and quality, by spreading wireless signals across the entire
available spectrum. This kind of encoding is only possible using
the kind of frequency switching that Hedwig Kiesler invented.
And now you know the rest of the story.
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