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| Ada Lovelace Day Blog: The Hedy Heights of Women in Tech |
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| Written by Charlotte Cooper | |
| Monday, 23 March 2009 | |
 A Woman in Technology: Hedy Lamarr Screen sirens from the Golden Age of film in the '30s were known for many things: their stunning looks, their sharp tongues, and their secret communications systems designed to aid the defeat of Hitler. Well, okay ... the secret communications clause only applies to Hollywood's Austrian gem, Hedy Lamarr, and she isn't really well enough known for it. In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, we're going to tell you more about her. Hedy was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, 1913. She took effortlessly to acting, causing a stir in the film Ecstasy, which became famous for its nudity on screen, and making her way to the MGM lots in America to carve out a successful acting career in Hollywood. Her first flirtations with control systems came about with Fritz Mandl, the first of six husbands, who was working as a munitions manufacturer in Berlin. She attended numerous dinners and meetings with arms developers, builders, and buyers absorbing information that would manifest itself as an epiphany at a dinner party. Hedy became engaged in a discussion about protecting US radio-guided torpedoes from enemy interference over dinner with avant-garde musician George Antheil. She brought frequency hopping to the table, putting the idea of spread-spectrum communication into the context of radio remote control and the little grey cells began to flit between them. Interested in continuing this conversation, Hedy left her phone number written in lipstick on the windshield of Antheil's car and cemented the partnership that would lead to the fruit of that discussion becoming the patented design later to be used by the Navy. Frequency hopping is a form of communication where transmitted radio signals are sent over a rapidly changing sequence of frequency channels known only to the transmitter and receiver. As a form of communication it is difficult to intercept, making it perfect for military use.  The typical form this kind of communication takes begins with the initiating party sending a request via a predetermined frequency or control channel. The receiving party replies by sending a seed, a number which can be used as a variable in a predefined algorithm which generates the frequencies the two parties will communicate on. A synchronization signal is sent by the initiating party to the first frequency to acknowledge the correct sequencing of the seed. Lamarr and Antheil's patent used a piano-roll to change between 88 frequencies. Though it was not utilised at the time it was rediscovered in the '50s when code division multiple access was invented independently. The information, and some sketchy images of the original patent, can be found here on Colitz.com and here on MobilityPR.com. For more information on Lamarr, we recommend listening to playwright Elyse Singer's interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation found here in which she talks about the play "Frequencing Hopping" which was staged in New York last summer. The play is all about the Hedy Lamarr and her involvement in the frequency hopping invention. Technology-minded women can be found everywhere. You just have to look. **** Charlotte Cooper is a staff writer for UnderTheMicroscope.com.
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