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Frequency hopping
What do a Viennese-born Hollywood bombshell famed for nude scenes most Americans never saw and a conservatory-trained avant-garde composer with a hankering for mechanical pianos, airplane propellers, and sirens have to do with U.S. Patent # 2,292,387?
Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil co-invented frequency hopping, in which a signal could be transmitted over a seemingly random series of radio frequencies, switching from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals to avoid easy decoding.
Intended to be used for guidance systems for unmanned military devices (i.e. torpedoes) during World War II, this technology formed the basis for later improvements in communication from the 1962 blockade of Cuba to today’s wireless and cellular technology.
Read more about this unusual collaboration and even more unusual collaborators:
The Hedy Lamarr Story
Female Inventors - Hedy Lamarr
britneyspears.ac/physics/intro/hedy.htm
Bad Boy of Music: The World of george Antheil
George Antheil Home Page
The Ballet Mecanique Page
Special thanks to Mom for inadvertently suggesting this post by seeing Lamarr recently in a film and remarking “she was so beautiful.” Little did I know how remarkable she was until reading further. It also made me respect my recording of Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique” (Music Masters Jazz No. 67094, 1994) a little more.
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