Secret Radio Controlled by Piano Roll
By Robbie Rhodes
The next time you use a frequency-hopping cellular telephone, give a brief thought to the improbable woman who first patented some of its underlying technology 55 years ago -- "the most beautiful girl in the world," Vienna-born actress Hedy Lamarr. The sultry, sophisticated brunette star of such hits as "Samson and Delilah" had an inquiring intellect and an engineering bent that in another era might have taken her not to Hollywood, but to Stanford or MIT.
Lamarr wanted to work at the newly established National Inventors Council in Washington, D.C., but was told she could do more for her newly-adopted country by using her star status to sell war bonds. In 1941, she met composer George Antheil at a Hollywood party. Dubbed "the bad boy of music," Antheil composed avant-garde, mechanistic symphonies.
As her son, Anthony Loder recalls, "(She and Antheil) were sitting at the piano one day and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said, 'Hey, look, we're talking to each other and we're changing keys all the time.'"
Together they worked on the idea. A simple radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to jam. But what if the signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals? Anyone trying to listen to the signal, or to jam it with noise, wouldn't know where to look next. But if both the sender and the receiver were hopping in synch, the message would come through loud and clear.
Antheil, whose compositions had featured up to 14 player pianos playing simultaneously, suggested using identical piano rolls to make sure both sides were in synch. Their patent for a "Secret Communication System" was granted on Aug. 11, 1942.
"I read the patent," said Franklin Antonio, chief technical officer of Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego, a maker of civil and military communications systems. "You don't usually think of movie stars having brains, but she sure did."
It was a brilliant idea, but years ahead of its time. The Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clockwork mechanism controlled by paper roll too cumbersome to be implemented. But in 1962, three years after the patent expired, the pair's ideas were used to secure military communi- cation systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba.
( Adapted from a story by Elizabeth Weise, Associated Press, appearing in the Ontario, California, Daily Bulletin, Monday, March 10, 1997, "Movie star's ideas helped lead to cellular phone." ) |
(Message sent Tue 11 Mar 1997, 02:05:36 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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