It all started with a skin flick...In 1933, a beautiful, young Austrian
woman took off her clothes for a movie director. She ran through the woods... naked. She swam in a lake... naked. Pushing well beyond the social norms of the
period, the movie also featured a simulated orgasm. To make the scene "vivid," the
director reportedly stabbed the actress with a sharp pin just off screen.
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. Today, when you use your cell phone or, over the next few years, as you
experience super-fast wireless Internet access (via something called
"long-term evolution" or "LTE" technology), you'll be using
an extension of the technology a 20- year-old actress first conceived while
sitting at dinner with Hitler.
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. Kiesler sat
through these dinners "looking stupid," while absorbing everything
she heard...As a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis.
She abhorred her husband's business ambitions. Mandl responded to his willful wife by
imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape. She drugged
her maid, snuck out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes, and sold her
jewelry to finance a trip to London. (She got out just in time. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl's factory. He was half Jewish. Mandl fled to Brazil. Later, he became an advisor to Argentina's
iconic populist president, Juan Peron.)
In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a long-term contract with him,
becoming one of MGM's biggest stars. She
appeared in more than 20 films. She was
a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first
seven MGM movies was a blockbuster.
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 Antheil. Antheil
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 Antheil’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, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to
Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey," which was Kiesler's married name
at the time.
Most of you won't recognize the name Kiesler. And no one would remember the name Hedy
Markey. But it's a fair bet than anyone
reading this newsletter 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're 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.----Naomi Ragan
