With her 1942 invention - patent number 2,292,387 - actress Heddy Lamarr helped shape the development of spread spectrum technology.

In WWII Hollywood, most actresses were content selling war bonds and rallying troops

But one young glamour queen got a patent for radio technology intended to help Americans torpedo German ships - and ended up changing the world

By Rick Mathieson

Remember Hollywood's Golden Age, when actors like Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart put hot careers on hold to fight World War Two - and a young starlet named Hedy Lamarr invented the basis for spread spectrum wireless technology in an effort to torpedo Nazis?

Oh, wait: you probably don't know the part about Hedy Lamarr.

But the true-life tale of that bright young star of yesteryear is getting a lot of attention these days - partly because it involves a glamorous movie star who put on her thinking cap when her country needed it most.

And partly because her idea ended up shaping the world of wi-fi wireless networks, CDMA cell phones, mobile health monitors, satellite-guided missiles and more.

"Invention is found in all kinds of strange corners," says Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin, who ranks Lamarr's concept as one of the top three key influences on the development of today's spread spectrum technology, which uses wide swaths of spectrum to enable devices to communicate without interfering with one another. "Hedy Lamarr's concept is found in pretty much all next-generation wireless solutions, from 3G to wide-band TDMA to CDMA 2000."

That's right, Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian actress who in 1933 became the first woman to appear nude in a feature film, appropriately titled Ecstasy, that sparked an international scandal and made her a star.

Hedy Lamarr, the brunette bombshell who took Hollywood by storm in such films as Ziegfeld Girl, The Heavenly Body and, later, Samson and Delilah.

"Her fame as an actress was insignificant and unimportant to me compared to how she contributed to the comfort level of mankind and made life easier and more efficient," says Lamarr's son, Anthony Loder. "Her film stardom was superficial, short-term success, while her scientific contribution is truly meaningful."

Indeed, it was that 1942 invention - patent number 2,292,387 - that Lamarr would consider her crowning achievement. Identified simply as a "Secret Communications System," Lamarr's idea helped change the world, even if the world didn't recognize it for nearly sixty years.

Her story reads like a Hollywood script come to life.

once upon a time in tinseltown

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kielsler in Vienna on November 9, 1914, Lamarr became an international film star by the time she was 19.

In 1933, she married Fritz Mandl, a millionaire industrialist who sold bombs to Hitler and Mussolini.

Extremely possessive of Lamarr, Mandl tried to buy, and then burn, all the prints of Ecstasy. He even kept armed guards around her at all times.

As the Third Reich began its conquest of Europe, Lamarr accompanied Mandl to numerous meetings with Hitler, where she overheard conversations about radio-guided torpedoes and the Nazis' attempts to figure out ways to stop the enemy from jamming them.

"Hedy was a free spirit who felt the environment turn increasingly negative and claustrophobic," says Loder. "She began to hate what Mandl and the Nazis stood for."

Her revulsion for Mandl and the Nazis grew in lockstep, until one night in 1937, she drugged the family maid, slid out the window, and headed for Paris.

From there, the plot twists quicken: A chance meeting with movie mogul Louis B. Mayer at a dinner party in Normandy turned into a $500 a week MGM contract, English lessons and a new name - crafted by Mrs. Mayer, who couldn't pronounce "Kiesler" - created a legend called Hedy Lamarr.

Fast forward five years. Lamarr, at one of those famous Hollywood parties, sparks a conversation with a passionate, avant-garde composer named George Antheil, the man who composed the Ballet Mécanique, a work that became famous for using 16 player pianos playing in sync. The topic of discussion: protecting U.S. radio-guided torpedoes from enemy interference. (Hey, whatever floats your boat - or in this case, sinks it.)

As the story goes, Lamarr scrawled her phone number in lipstick on the windshield of Antheil's car so they could meet and explore their ideas further.

And according to script, the duo met, became romantically involved, and continued to develop their idea for a jam-proof missile guidance system in-between movie shoots, symphonies, and those raucous nights about town.

	Lamarr and Antheil's "Secret Communications System' involved a piano-based device that could shift radio communications quickly and synchronously between a large number of bandwidths, transmitted from a plane to a torpedo for instance.

the hollywood shuffle

Here's the basic idea: At the time, radio control signals were transmitted to guide torpedoes to their target. The transmitter and receiver had to be set to the same frequency, which was easily intercepted and jammed.

Instead of transmitting targeting data over a single frequency, Lamarr and Antheil envisioned sending guidance over 88 constantly changing frequencies - like the 88 keys on a player piano. Since the transmitter and the torpedo's receiver would constantly change frequencies in a pre-set pattern, they would be impervious to jamming.

In August, 1942, the duo was awarded a patent for their "Secret Communications System,' a player piano-based contraption that could shift radio communications quickly and synchronously between a large number of bandwidths, transmitted from a plane to a torpedo for instance.

Lamarr took the idea to the Department of the Navy, which promptly shelved it, probably because it seemed silly to have torpedoes play 'Name That Tune' using a miniature player piano.

"She could have just as easily brought her idea to her friend Howard Hughes, who could have turned it into a Bill Gates-style phenomenon," says Loder. "She could have been a billionaire. But she said, 'I'm giving it to America to help stop the war. I'm grateful to be here, and I want to give something back.'"

But it took 20 years for mechanical things to evolve into electronic things like integrated circuits, transistors, and receivers that would make Lamarr and Antheil's idea workable.

"It opened up a new way of using radio waves," says Richard Nebeker, senior research historian for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) History Center. "It wasn't practical as originally patented, but the idea was important."

In the late 50s, electronics giant Sylvania picked up the idea and developed it, first for the military, which deployed it on ships sent to blockade Cuba during the missile crisis in 1962.

And today, over 1,000 patents for spread spectrum wireless devices refer back to that Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis for the technology - including 802.11 wireless Internet technologies, remote health monitors, the U.S. military's $328 billion Milstar satellite communications network, and Irwin Jacob's code-division multiple access (CDMA) technology developed at Qualcomm - all stemming from a bright idea from a starlet roughly the age of Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

"This idea really was a linchpin in the evolution of wireless," says Golvin. "Historians are looking back on who was responsible for all this innovation, and Lamarr is finally getting her due."

Better late than never. In 1997, three years before her death at age 86, Lamarr was awarded a Spirit of Achievement Award for her invention.

This year, Lamarr's contribution is being recognized by the National Women's History Museum in Washington, D.C., as well as by the IEEE. And the October 24 issue of Electronic Design lists Lamarr in its Inventors Hall of Fame.

"I like to think that what Gutenberg was to the print world, Hedy was to the wireless world," says Loder, adding that at the end of her life, "she appreciated the fact that her idea was not in vain – and she was happy that she left behind something that is so important to so many people."

Now that's a Hollywood ending.