When one thinks of the Jewish screen siren Hedy Lamarr, images of wireless technology do not exactly come to mind.
More than likely one thinks about her starring roles in Tortilla Flat (1942) and Samson and Delilah (1949). And yet, in 1942, “the most beautiful woman in Hollywood” received a patent with composer George Antheil for a “frequency hopping, spread-spectrum communication system” designed to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect or jam.
Lamarr and Antheil made an interesting pair of collaborators. She was an Austrian-born beauty who practiced electrical engineering when off the movie lot; he was an avant-garde composer, notably of “Ballet Mécanique,” a score that included synchronized player pianos. The two used the mechanisms of those player pianos to devise a method whereby a controlling radio and its receiver would jump from one frequency to another in synch, so that the radio waves could not be blocked…
Read about the U.S. Navy’s misogynist response to Lamarr, and more in the full post on Kveller.com!
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This post is the first in a four-part series between Kveller, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and Jewniverse commemorating women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for Jewish American Heritage Month. Every Monday in May you can look forward to a new post about a Jewish woman who helped to lay the groundwork for women in science today.
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