Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent WiFi & Bluetooth
 

That's Hedy, not Hedley....

Actress Hedy Lamarr helped invent Bluetooth Technology. That's true! Besides being a glamorous actress in the 1930s and 40's, she was a math whiz, and helped invent the technology that was a building block for our modern bluetooth devices. And she appointed the new sheriff for Rock Ridge.... Story is here, long read but good read:

From Wiki:

Avant garde composer George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mécanique, originally written for Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.

Lamarr took her idea to Antheil and together, Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942, US Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey," Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. Although a presentation of the technique was soon made to the U.S. Navy, it met with opposition and was not adopted.

The idea was not implemented in the USA until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution. In 1998, Ottawa wireless technology developer Wi-LAN Inc. acquired a 49 percent claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock. Antheil had died in 1959.

Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections, and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 patent Secrecy Communication System seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil's patent, which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.

Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds.

You saw that show the other day, too.


Pretty interesting stuff.

Hedley!

She wanted a bigger rack, so she asked Hedley to help her.

He found out that she was extremely smart, and smart+hot= WIN.

Her life needs to be a movie. And just think she used spread spectrum in the early 40's. But we didn't see the further application of the tech until the 60's? Cause she was a movie star? A girl?

Not entirely, but there may have been a small portion.

The initial application of spread spectrum as directly aimed at naval ordinance guidance. And when Hedy and her partner made their presentation to DoD, they phrased it as a 'player piano' roll for torpedos [to that point, torpedos were guided by wire]. It's an open question whether their work as dismissed for a bad presentation or due to her being a Hollywood beauty.

However, in a more explicit yet more ambiguous development, Hedy stopped working on spread spectrum when the Feds convinced her she could do more for the war effort as a starlet raising funds. She raised millions in War Bonds instead, so while it was pigeonholing, the position wasn't entirely without merit.

The subsequent development of spread spectrum for communications was for widely divergent applications than Hedy was concentrating on, but by that time, it was a post-war lull, she was comfortable in Hollywood, and corporations were developing her ideas [which she had gifted to the FedGov] without her input. The uses for spread spectrum that arose in the late 50s and early 60s had to wait on the development of other technologies independent of spread spectrum itself, and the urgency of ordinance guidance was much less in the post-war era.