Not a Fan Letter
Dear Hedy Lamarr, This is not a fan letter. At least, not in the Hollywood sense. Like too many things in your life, it arrives in an untimely fashion. A Woman, Interrupted—by a dictatorial husband, the Hollywood image machine, and ghostwriters, among...
Analog to Digital
to the digital. from the analog the passage a life that marks your life, best describes frequency hopping The idea of things to come… as the prophet of never to be recognized doomed, like Cassandra, were betrayed by it. technology you who mastered Ironically, ...
Loder/Connected the Planet
Your son, Anthony Loder,sums up the effects of your pioneering efforts: “I know for instance that telephones have previously been rare in parts of the world and in India, but Hedy has essentially succeeded in connecting the planet.” Learn the Back Story Learn...
Electronic Frontier Award
Belatedly, in 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation acknowledged your contributions to the wireless revolution with a special award. Your response was a sardonic: “It’s about time.” Learn the Back Story Learn...
Gates
Had you not been a true patriot to your adopted country, signing over the patent rights to the government, you would have been more recognized and rewarded than even this fellow… Learn the Back Story Learn...
Name on Patent
Advised not to compromise your Hollywood image as a different form of “bombshell,” even your name appears on the patent in code. U.S. Patent 2,292,387 (Secret Communication System). Granted August 11, 1942, to Hedy Kiesler Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil. Learn...
Kiss Auction
Unfortunately, you were persuaded by Antheil to help the war effort by trading on your celebrity, raising $7,000,000 in a one-day kissing marathon. “I’m just a gold-digger for Uncle Sam.” Learn the Back Story Learn...
Desire to Serve by Inventing
You announced your intention to join the National Inventors Council “They could just have me around,and ask me questions.” Learn the Back Story Learn...
Cuban Missile Crisis
Patented in 1942, your Secret Communication System would enable torpedoes to find their targets by avoiding enemy jamming of their radio signals. Decades ahead of its time, it would later be employed to encrypt communication signals among U.S. ships during the Cuban...
FUNCTION #8. RECONFIGURE: White Cargo
Z Note There is support for low-resolution “proxy” images. Hollywood often treated you like a posable doll. All too often, many of your roles involved suicide efforts or, in White Cargo, you played the role of a femme fatale, forced at the end to drink poison....
Piano in Torpedo
Ironically, the aesthetics of a torpedo guided by musical notes may have been a fatal “design flaw” in stoking an “anti-cultural bias” among the military types who examined the patent, as Antheil surmises: “In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our...
Military Instrumental Complex
In retrospect, you two artists almost succeeded in creating a “military-instrumental complex.” Learn the Back Story Learn...
Ciphering Text
As both a ciphering device and a cybertext, your invention’s ability to send secret messages through noisy channels can help decode its own author’s life. Learn the Back Story Learn...
Pound “Brought the Two Together”
The reason? In Pound’s appreciative critique of the SonatesSauvages, he seems to intuit the future project that would draw the unlikely duo together: “The first of these sonatas ‘does it,’ the base is really a basis, the music rises and acts above it, like a...
Antheil’s Composition Techniques
First, the positive. . . Descriptions of Antheil’s musical technique suggest the same multi-layering of complex relationships. Analyzing Antheil’s Airplane Sonata, Linda Whitesitt describes his “manipulation of ostinato patterns and his technique...
88 Frequencies/Hard to Intercept
Any enemy attempting to jam the radio signals would have to decode what pattern among the eighty-eight possible frequencies was guiding the torpedo—an impossible task. Learn the Back Story Learn...
Cardan Grille
An electronic version of the Cardan Grille, a predetermined set of frequencies would be established between sender and receiver, as though each one had the top card with slots that could be placed over the coded message: “Sir John regards you well and spekesagain that...
Scrambled Message
Such an arrangement would allow both sender and receiver (the torpedo guidance system) to “hop in sync.” Encoded Message: The perforations on each roll would correspond exactly to the coded numbering sequence. Learn the Back Story Learn...
Synchronized Coding Mechanism
You used two synchronized piano rolls as your coding mechanism! This one in the transmitter and the other one in the torpedo, simultaneously tuned to the same message Learn the Back Story Learn...
