Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Wi-Fi, submarines, Hedy Lamarr
San Diegan Bill Garrison had to advise Jimmy Carter on her
From the movie Bombshell: the Hedy Lamarr Story via the New Yorker
“This whole thing evolved because of her beauty,” says Bill Garrison. “Louis B. Mayer called her ‘The most beautiful girl in the world.’”
“She” was Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian immigrant who became a Hollywood star and oh yeah: invented Wi-Fi.
Longtime San Diegan Garrison knows about Lamarr because when he was in the National Telecommunications and Information Agency he had to decide what to tell President Carter to do with her Wi-Fi invention: Keep it locked up behind a Defense Department patent, or release it to propel the digital revolution? Carter’s recent passing has brought back the whole “Hedy episode.”
“Ms. Lamarr was a kind of polymath. Up to and throughout the Second World War, she developed this concept. The incredible thing is she worked on it while she was waiting to shoot scenes for movies she starred in. Her whole drive was to enable the allied ships and submarines to communicate in a way that the Germans couldn’t track,” Garrison says. He says Wi-Fi, or the concept of ‘spread spectrum,’ came to Lamarr when she was collaborating with a musician, George Antheil. “Together, they experimented with the construct of music being played in overlap, as you would find in baroque music — like with Bach! Perfect example — she got the idea from the way baroque musical themes run throughout a composition, often in opposition, often in coordination. And guess what? She had a background in radio engineering, and it occurred to her that you could use that construct, and move transmissions across different radio bands, making it difficult ultimately to track, if you are the Nazi enemy. That was the whole thing. It’s all math.”
But what was a movie star doing, thinking about radio transmissions? Garrison says this unlikely circumstance evolved because of Hedy Lamarr’s beauty. Lamarr’s first husband was a fellow-Austrian, an arms dealer. And a Nazi sympathizer. He used Hedy’s beauty as bait to attract Germans interested in building up Hitler’s war chest.
“Her first husband was a Nazi symp,” says Garrison. “So he would have these people from the defense ministry in Germany come down to his [house] in the Austrian countryside, and they would do deals. And she, beautiful young wife, had to be the hostess. So she would go around and chit-chat with all these characters, and then she would preside at the dinner table. What this guy didn’t know when he married Hedy was that she was, a) brilliant, and b) had a photographic memory. So she would look at these various papers that they were spreading around casually, and she would remember what these documents said. And then she would remember what was said at dinner. And when it came time for the women to be excused while men brought out their cigars, she would go up to her boudoir and write notes on everything that she’d read and heard. And she took all of this to the British Embassy. And they had enough sense to realize how valuable this information was. So they arranged to get her and her parents out of Austria, and to the UK. If any of her husband’s [Nazi] pals had gotten the slightest hint of what she was doing, she would have been dead in five minutes.”
Garrison says that in the forties, when Hedy Lamarr developed this ‘spread-spectrum’ concept for a radio guidance system to steer allied torpedoes, the whole driver on her part was to enable the allied ships and submarines to communicate in a way that the Germans couldn’t track. As patriots, she and musician-design partner George Antheil signed their patent over to the US Defense Department (then called the War Department), which sat on their invention for the rest of the war. “Well,” says Garrison, “the Defense Department saw “actress” as co-inventor…Uh, no. They were never going to do anything with an invention patented by an actress. They did nothing with it all those years.” Nobody thought about it till the patent came up for renewal, 35 years later, in the Carter presidency. Garrison was there. “Of course, everybody in the room knew who Hedy Lamarr was,” says Garrison. “It was like, ‘WHO? WHAT?! Invented THIS?’ There was a lot of laughing. A lot of people going ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ ‘This can’t be true!’ An actress creating a weapon of war?’”
But Jimmy Carter didn’t laugh. Jimmy Carter had been a submariner in the Second World War.
“I’ve been told, by people who were involved with the briefing of the president,” says Garrison, “that he was very unhappy that this technology which could have saved the lives of any number of people, not the least being his cohort in the submarine division of the U.S. Navy, possibly even the submarine that he was on, was never developed. It didn’t take Carter but a couple of nano-seconds to work out that the defense department had not served the public interest very well. So he ordered Hedy Lamarr’s system that used “frequency-hopping” technology to be released to the general public. In a stroke, he democratized this crucial technology. And this technology has led to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and GPS. Carter basically just said ‘Screw that! We’re going to allow the system to be commercialized.’ Once the systems proved out, then anybody who could build a system was allowed to [do so]. So Wi-Fi from the beginning was democratized technology, available to anybody who could do it. And now it’s everywhere. And that’s how [the world got] Wi-Fi.” But did anyone ask Hedy Lamarr herself? “You know, I don’t think she was ever asked for her opinion about what to do with it. I think the lawyer didn’t see any need to confer with her.”
But it did start a discussion in the communications engineering world, particularly when the early Wi-Fi systems proved out, and we knew that it could be opened up. Wi-Fi enables radio signals to be transmitted over unlicensed spectrum bands, so a person can operate a Wi-Fi system in their house, or out on the street, without having to have a radio license from the FCC. Which is why Wi-Fi became ubiquitous.”
But the Russians, the Brits?
“Nobody even knew about it. Nobody had even thought about the concept, no one had even developed a prototype. Till Hedy Lamarr. She was a remarkable woman. Go Hedy!”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Wi-Fi, submarines, Hedy Lamarr
San Diegan Bill Garrison had to advise Jimmy Carter on her
Wi-Fi, submarines, Hedy Lamarr
San Diegan Bill Garrison had to advise Jimmy Carter on her
From the movie Bombshell: the Hedy Lamarr Story via the New Yorker
“This whole thing evolved because of her beauty,” says Bill Garrison. “Louis B. Mayer called her ‘The most beautiful girl in the world.’”
“She” was Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian immigrant who became a Hollywood star and oh yeah: invented Wi-Fi.
Longtime San Diegan Garrison knows about Lamarr because when he was in the National Telecommunications and Information Agency he had to decide what to tell President Carter to do with her Wi-Fi invention: Keep it locked up behind a Defense Department patent, or release it to propel the digital revolution? Carter’s recent passing has brought back the whole “Hedy episode.”
“Ms. Lamarr was a kind of polymath. Up to and throughout the Second World War, she developed this concept. The incredible thing is she worked on it while she was waiting to shoot scenes for movies she starred in. Her whole drive was to enable the allied ships and submarines to communicate in a way that the Germans couldn’t track,” Garrison says. He says Wi-Fi, or the concept of ‘spread spectrum,’ came to Lamarr when she was collaborating with a musician, George Antheil. “Together, they experimented with the construct of music being played in overlap, as you would find in baroque music — like with Bach! Perfect example — she got the idea from the way baroque musical themes run throughout a composition, often in opposition, often in coordination. And guess what? She had a background in radio engineering, and it occurred to her that you could use that construct, and move transmissions across different radio bands, making it difficult ultimately to track, if you are the Nazi enemy. That was the whole thing. It’s all math.”
But what was a movie star doing, thinking about radio transmissions? Garrison says this unlikely circumstance evolved because of Hedy Lamarr’s beauty. Lamarr’s first husband was a fellow-Austrian, an arms dealer. And a Nazi sympathizer. He used Hedy’s beauty as bait to attract Germans interested in building up Hitler’s war chest.
“Her first husband was a Nazi symp,” says Garrison. “So he would have these people from the defense ministry in Germany come down to his [house] in the Austrian countryside, and they would do deals. And she, beautiful young wife, had to be the hostess. So she would go around and chit-chat with all these characters, and then she would preside at the dinner table. What this guy didn’t know when he married Hedy was that she was, a) brilliant, and b) had a photographic memory. So she would look at these various papers that they were spreading around casually, and she would remember what these documents said. And then she would remember what was said at dinner. And when it came time for the women to be excused while men brought out their cigars, she would go up to her boudoir and write notes on everything that she’d read and heard. And she took all of this to the British Embassy. And they had enough sense to realize how valuable this information was. So they arranged to get her and her parents out of Austria, and to the UK. If any of her husband’s [Nazi] pals had gotten the slightest hint of what she was doing, she would have been dead in five minutes.”
Garrison says that in the forties, when Hedy Lamarr developed this ‘spread-spectrum’ concept for a radio guidance system to steer allied torpedoes, the whole driver on her part was to enable the allied ships and submarines to communicate in a way that the Germans couldn’t track. As patriots, she and musician-design partner George Antheil signed their patent over to the US Defense Department (then called the War Department), which sat on their invention for the rest of the war. “Well,” says Garrison, “the Defense Department saw “actress” as co-inventor…Uh, no. They were never going to do anything with an invention patented by an actress. They did nothing with it all those years.” Nobody thought about it till the patent came up for renewal, 35 years later, in the Carter presidency. Garrison was there. “Of course, everybody in the room knew who Hedy Lamarr was,” says Garrison. “It was like, ‘WHO? WHAT?! Invented THIS?’ There was a lot of laughing. A lot of people going ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ ‘This can’t be true!’ An actress creating a weapon of war?’”
But Jimmy Carter didn’t laugh. Jimmy Carter had been a submariner in the Second World War.
“I’ve been told, by people who were involved with the briefing of the president,” says Garrison, “that he was very unhappy that this technology which could have saved the lives of any number of people, not the least being his cohort in the submarine division of the U.S. Navy, possibly even the submarine that he was on, was never developed. It didn’t take Carter but a couple of nano-seconds to work out that the defense department had not served the public interest very well. So he ordered Hedy Lamarr’s system that used “frequency-hopping” technology to be released to the general public. In a stroke, he democratized this crucial technology. And this technology has led to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and GPS. Carter basically just said ‘Screw that! We’re going to allow the system to be commercialized.’ Once the systems proved out, then anybody who could build a system was allowed to [do so]. So Wi-Fi from the beginning was democratized technology, available to anybody who could do it. And now it’s everywhere. And that’s how [the world got] Wi-Fi.” But did anyone ask Hedy Lamarr herself? “You know, I don’t think she was ever asked for her opinion about what to do with it. I think the lawyer didn’t see any need to confer with her.”
But it did start a discussion in the communications engineering world, particularly when the early Wi-Fi systems proved out, and we knew that it could be opened up. Wi-Fi enables radio signals to be transmitted over unlicensed spectrum bands, so a person can operate a Wi-Fi system in their house, or out on the street, without having to have a radio license from the FCC. Which is why Wi-Fi became ubiquitous.”
But the Russians, the Brits?
“Nobody even knew about it. Nobody had even thought about the concept, no one had even developed a prototype. Till Hedy Lamarr. She was a remarkable woman. Go Hedy!”
Comments