Hi I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love
history and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
Odds are that you're either watching or you downloaded this video on Wi-Fi. What you
may not know is how Navy torpedoes, and a collaboration between an experimental
musician and a world-famous movie star helped to make that possible.
Hedvig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in 1915 in Austria, the daughter of a banker and
a concert pianist. They were a wealthy family and she benefited from a good education and finishing
school. And she grew up to be a beautiful girl with pitch black hair and skin so porcelain white
that her mother called her Snow White. But her father died in the midst of an Austrian financial
crisis, and she and her mother were left with a fraction of her family's former wealth, and so
she was forced to take work, as a script girl at an Austrian film studio. She had always dreamed,
it appears, of being a movie star. Well she started to get small roles in Austrian movies
and eventually got a role in an experimental and at the time very scandalous film made by a Czech
filmmaker that gained international acclaim and made her a movie star. And that drew the
attention of a wealthy handsome industrialist, and so they married and she gave up her career.
But it was not a happy marriage, he was demanding and controlling and abusive, and worst he was an
ardent Nazi. And so she escaped, first to Paris and then to London, and it was in London in 1937,
that through a connection she met Louie B. Mayer the head of the MGM film studio. Enchanted with
her beauty he knew at once that she would be a movie star. It was at Mayer's urging that
she changed her last name to Lamar, named after a beautiful silent film star who had died too young.
Hedy Lamarr's first film was called Algiers costaring with Charles Boyer and Sigrid Gurie,
released in 1938. The film was said to be the inspiration for the more famous film,
Casablanca. The film was a great success largely due to Lamar's stunning beauty. She would star
in a string of films successes and become known as, the most beautiful woman in films.
But for a movie star she was described as being very unHollywood. She didn't drink,
she didn't enjoy lavish Hollywood parties. She was very intelligent and grew bored with her roles
which just tended to focus on her beauty. She complained too that, “Any girl can be glamorous,
all you have to do is stand there and look stupid.” and so she began to fill her time
inventing. She had a drafting table installed in her house and she filled the room with
technical manuals and she fiddled with a lot of different ideas. An improved Kleenex box,
a different kind of stoplight, a tablet that when dropped in water would make it taste like
coca-cola. Reportedly she collaborated with Howard Hughes on the design of more
efficient airplane wings. But it wasn't until 1940 when at a dinner party she met composer
George Anthell that the idea for what would become her most famous invention was formed.
They were both interested in inventing and tinkering. Anthell was an experimental
composer who pushed the bounds of technology and musical composition. And when you get
an experimental composer and a movie star together to talk about inventing,
of course the very first thing that comes to mind is..torpedoes.
You see the war was going on in Europe and looked like it would soon involve the United States,
and being an ardent anti-nazi, Hedy Lamarr really wanted to help the war effort. And she
actually knew something about munitions because her first husband, the Nazi who abused her,
was a manufacturer of military munitions. Her idea was that if a Navy torpedo could be radio
controlled, it would be much more effective at sinking ships. But the problem was it was too
easy to jam the frequency that would be used to control the torpedo. And the idea that the two
of them came up with was, that if the torpedo were to shift radio frequencies frequently,
then it would be much more difficult to jam the torpedo. But the problem
was is that required that the torpedo would be shifting frequencies in exact
synchronization with the transmitter that was being used to control the torpedo.
And that's where George Anthell came in. As an experimental composer, one of the things that
he had done was compose a piece that synced together 16 player pianos, and in short,
the way that they solved their problem was to use a sheet of paper that had holes in it,
very like the roll on a player piano, that would allow the torpedo and the transmitter to shift
frequencies in synchronization. Now it was a brilliant idea and in 1942 it was granted a
patent, under the name “A Secret Communications System”. But the Navy decided not to use it,
they thought it would be too bulky to put inside a normal torpedo. And it was classified Top Secret
so it couldn't get any commercial use, and having given it to the Navy, even if it did they could
never get any financial benefit from it. So they really pretty much forgot about it. It
didn't seem to go anywhere and Hedy Lamarr did get her dream of helping the war effort, because
as a movie star she helped to raise millions and millions of dollars selling war bonds.
But then in the 1950s the Navy decided that it needed to build something called
a sounding device. And that would be a buoy that would be dropped from an airplane that
would use sonar to find submarines and then radio the information back to the airplane.
And what they needed was a way for it to radio that information, that could
not easily be jammed or intercepted. And so they rediscovered the patent,
and those kinds of devices were used for example in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If you understand the technology that we're talking about, then you might recognize that
it is a very early version of something called spread-spectrum communication technology. And
it works from the idea that if you broadcast a signal over multiple shifting frequencies then
you can broadcast a much stronger signal with less interference. And it is a key technology
that is necessary for things like cell phones, or Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices.
And while lots of people were involved in the development of this technology, and there's
no real evidence that Anthell and Lamar ever built a working version of their invention,
their patent was rediscovered in the 1950s and has been cited many times as part of the
development of that technology that is so ubiquitous today. But since the patent had
been filed in her real name, and not her stage name, people did not recognize Hedy Lamarr's
contribution to this important technology until around the 1990s when she started to receive
some awards because of the influential patent and by then she was in her 80s.
Hedy Lamarr's life can be described as being somewhat tragic. Her film career eventually
faded and reportedly she refused a number of roles because she just found it boring.
She never quite got past being cast just for her looks. She was involved in some scandals,
she was caught shoplifting, had to pay a fine. She later in life tried to revive her film career and
revive her looks with plastic surgery and it did not work out so well, and so she was rarely seen
in public for the last three decades of her life. And of course her marvelous invention
didn't receive attention until late in life and she never did see a dime for technology that would
be today worth..billions. She passed away in the year 2000 at the age of 85, but she leaves behind
such a wonderful legacy, the beautiful body of film work that you can still watch today and she
is still one of the most beautiful women in the history of film. And of course an unquestionable
patriotism that allowed her to raise millions of dollars to help to fight the Nazis. And her
amazing invention, so far ahead of its time. I'm the History Guy, I hope you enjoyed this
edition of my series, 5 minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes
long. And if you did enjoy, please go ahead and put that thumbs up button that is there on your
left. If you have any questions or comments then feel free to write those in the comment section,
I would be happy to respond and if you'd like five minutes more forgotten history, all you need to do
is click the subscribe button that is there on your right.