Hedy Lamarr: The 40s “Bombshell” Mind Behind Secure WiFi, GPS And Bluetooth

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history and everything in between, including your story. Send them to Our American Stories dot Com. There’s some of our favorites. And today, we have Faith bringing us the story of Hettie Lamar. Take it away, Faith.

Famous Hollywood actress Hettie Lamar was born in Austria in nineteen fourteen. By the mid-nineteen-forties, she became the world’s first superstar in Hollywood. She was known for her striking beauty and her at times scandalous movie appearances. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes wrote a book titled, “Hetty’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hattie Lamar, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” This book helps unpack the life of a woman that perhaps we thought we knew. Here is Richard Rhodes.

When she walked into a room, she actually stopped conversations. People would be startled by her appearance. The sad tragedy of her life, in a way, though, was that she was also highly intelligent, and since she was so strikingly beautiful, hardly anyone ever noticed her intelligence. It wasn’t factored into the kind of roles she was given in movies, where she usually played some conventionally beautiful woman falling in and out of love with a handsome leading man. I mean, the tragedy of this woman was that she, as she pointed out, more than a pretty face. She liked to say sarcastically, ‘I can tell you how to be clamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’ Growing up in Vienna, her parents were wealthy. Her father was a Jewish banker and an athlete. Her mother had trained as a concert pianist, and she grew up in what was a really multicultural and multi-religious community in Vienna just around the time and after the time of the First World War, so a very cultured world. Vienna was just one of the centers of culture in those days, and particularly a theater, and she fell in love with theater. She was a good actress; she was smart, and he learned to play roles, and much more than the roles she later would play in American films ever tested her for. She also became kind of the catch of the day in Austria exactly because of her beauty on the one end and her fame on the other, and the second richest man in Austria decided he wanted her for his arm piece and courted her. His name was Fritz Mendel.

This relationship was doomed from the start. He had pursued her for her beauty, and because of that he also was terribly jealous and insecure, making him quite a horrible husband.

I mean, he had maids picking up the extension whenever she was talking with friends on the phone, and had her followed, and so forth. He was quite certain that she was cheating on him, which, as far as I understand, she was not. So, on the one hand, it was a glamorous life with castles and beautiful apartments in Vienna. But on the other hand, she said one time she felt as if she was in a golden cage because she really was locked away.

It was now nineteen thirty-four, and pretty soon the Nazis would take over Austria. Het, do you wanted to get out of Austria to pursue her dream of becoming a famous Hollywood actress. Of course, her jealous husband thought it was in bad taste for her to be an actress, so she decided to leave him.

The truth is, as I found when I researched the newspapers in New York and in Vienna, that it was quite a public divorce, as one might imagine. So, off she went first to Paris and then to London, and she had her jewelry to pond to put together a kind of nest egg. It happened at that particular point in time that a Metro Golden Louis B. Mayer, the director, was in London and traveling around Europe buying up the contracts of Jewish artists who understood that it was time to get out of Europe ahead of the Nazi attack on the Jews. He was able to sign get people to sign contracts with fairly low wages with his studio for up to eight years at a time, so he really was kind of buying job lots of European actors. Hetty wasn’t going to be conned into letting that happen to her, so when he made an offer to her after she met him in London, she basically said, ‘No, that’s not nearly sufficient,’ and walked out. That intrigued him, and then she found out what ship he was sailing back to the United States on, booked passage on the same ship, made sure he saw her playing deck tennis with handsome young men on the ship. And by the time they arrived in New York, she had a contract for a pretty good weekly salary for only three years and commitment to make a certain number of films. So she was launched.

She had charmed the director of MGM into hiring her for the price that she wanted. There’s no doubt that while her beauty at times was a burden, at other times she used it as a tool to get what she needed. She got to the States and soon started her new career as an actress.

And you’ve been listening to Richard Rhodes, and he’s the author of “Hetty’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hetty Lamar, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” And what a story we’re hearing so far! In my goodness, we learned right away what a tough negotiator Hetty Lamar is: not eight years, no, down to three years. She widows Louis B. Mayer and from or money, too. When we come back, this remarkable life, this remarkable American life, Hetty Lamar’s life continues here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories. And we’ve been listening to the story of a famous actress from the nineteen-forties, Patty Lamar. She had just derived from Europe and was beginning her acting career in the States. Her first film with MGM was with French-American actor Charles Boyer. We pick up with author Richard Rhodes describing Hetty’s breakout into Hollywood.

There’s a moment in the film, and it was really Hetty’s debut in Hollywood, where she steps out of a doorway into a lovely kind of sunlight, and she burst on the world as this extraordinarily beautiful woman and really became a star of Verneid as a result.

So from there, she made Maid a few more films with Metro Golden Mayor. She, like so many people who emigrated to the United States out of that terrible world of pre-World War II Europe, was immensely grateful to the country for taking her in, and she became a citizen around I think nineteen forty-two or forty-three, after she had spent the requisite time living in the United States.

Well, she loved her new home, the United States, and was grateful to be where she was. Her heart still went out to those in Europe. During the Great Blitz of London, when the Germans began bombing London relentlessly, the English moved their children out of London to the countryside, or in large numbers, they were shipped to Canada. This was the first time in history that countries were bombing cities and civilian areas in attempts to save them. The British sent their children away.

Hetty one day, reading following this in the newspapers, was horrified to read that a shipload of children, one of the liners that was being used to transport them, had been torpedoed by a German submarine and had sunk, with, I think, eighty-two children killed in that particular assault. By then, she had done something really quite unusual for Hollywood. She didn’t drink; she didn’t like to go to laud parties. But in order to fill her time between movies, she had to find something, some other way, to occupy herself, and she took up inventing. She invented some new kind of stoplight. She invented a chair on a pivot that could be swung into a shower so that someone who couldn’t stand up in the shower could take a shower and then swing back out in the chair and drive themselves off. So she was kind of a classic inventor in that she had no technical training particularly, but she had a way of looking at the world that asked, ‘How can you fix this problem, this large or small problem that exists?’ So when she read about the German submarines torpedoing all these English ships, particularly the ones with children on them, and realized that this was Austria and Germany was where she came from, and that it was horrible that her background should somehow be tied in with this terrible business of killing civilians, she decided she would figure out a way to make it more possible than it was at the time to attack and destroy a submarine. Unfortunately, the torpedoes of the day didn’t have any real guidance systems on them. You would kind of move as close as you could and aim the torpedo and the direction of the submarine, or rather where the submarine would be when you thought the torpedo would meet the submarine, and then you’d launch. And almost all of the torpedoes missed their targets. So she thought, ‘Well, there must be a way to guide a torpedo,’ and the way she thought of was using radio. A plane or a surface ship with a radio transmitter could transmit a signal to a torpedo that was probably, let’s say, towing an wire antenna behind it on the surface to pick up the signal, and the signal could direct the rudder on the torpedo left or right and guide the torpedo in real time to the submarine and blow up the submarine and therefore prevent the children from being kipt.

Well, the United States had not yet entered the war; there was an organization set up where invendors could send their wartime invention ideas to the government.

There were something like three hundred thousand submissions in the course of the Second World War. Unfortunately, almost none of which ever got developed into a workable instrument. That’s where Hetty turned to find support for her idea of a radio-controlled torpedo. Now, she also had found a collaborator. This was another colorful figure from the tens and twenties of the century named George Antil, an American composer of avant-garde music and a concert pianist. They met at a dinner party with some friends and immediately bonded over the fact that they were both very interested in the European War. Hetty broached the idea of her torpedo. Anti was immediately interested. The question became, what kind of radio control system could you use? There were no, no, no digital chips in those days. What would actually tell the torpedo how to direct itself? Antile’s music had featured a number of compositions, some of them quite notorious, using player pianos, and the player piano is operated by a scroll of paper with holes in it that rolls past a vacuum pipe, and where there’s a whole, air is sucked in, and that triggers the mechanism that makes a key activate on the piano. So Antile imagined that you could probably make a miniature version of one of these scrolls. You could make them out of something more durable than paper, obviously, and that that device with its impact. He actually gave the scroll that they used in their Model eighty-eight holes rather like the keys on a piano. So they then Hetty’s original idea for a radio-controlled torpedo. They wanted one, however, that couldn’t be jammed by a radio signal, because if somebody was on the enemy side with picking up radio signals and they heard the signal being transmitted from the ship to the torpedo, they could, by producing a sound on the same frequency, basically jammed the signal. So how do you solve that problem? Well, there Heeadi got her idea from one of the world’s first remote control boxes that had ever been used. She bought a very expensive radio, and radios in those days were the sizes of refrigerators. She bought a remote control for her living room radio that had was basically like the dial on an old dial phone, but it was a remote control, and she thought, ‘Well, something like that would work.’ That’s where the notion of having multiple frequencies, with the signal jumping from frequency to frequency in a more or less random pattern, would allow the transmitter to send a signal to the receiver in the torpedo that would jump around all over eighty-eight different frequencies, and that no one could follow fast enough with a jamming signal, so the signal could go through; it couldn’t be jamned. Here was a really great idea. They put it all together with the help of a physicist-specialist in electronics who was loaned to them by the National Inventors Council, the organization I mentioned that was there to make these inventions possibly useful to the government. So obviously, the National Inventors Council thought this was a worthy project, and indeed it was. It probably would have worked very well. But when they took it to the Navy, the obvious place to take it. Once you had worked out the basic ideas, that had a blueprint for an invention, which, by the way, she and George antile, Hetty and George, then patented. It was patented under Hetty’s maiden name, which at that time was Marquis. So the patent was assigned to Hedwig Marquis and George Antile under that name. It was given to them as a protection for their invention. They then donated this patent to the US Navy.

And you’ve been listening to Richard Rhodes, the author of the definitive biography of Hetty Lamar. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Hetty Lamar’s story, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and we’re about to hear the final part of famous Hollywood actress Eddie Lamar’s story. We learned that Hetty was not only beautiful, but she was brilliant as well. Her and her composer friend George Antel had created this frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology and then handed it over to the Navy. We return to Faith with the rest of the story.

After passing it off to the Navy, the Navy stamped at top secret, and they didn’t hear about it for a long time. Hetty went on to live her life. She had two children and ended up getting married a total of six times. The longest marriage lasting about seven years. After a little over a decade, in the early nineteen-fifties, the idea for the radio-control torpedo was resurrected. The technology would soon prove itself to be incredibly useful.

When someone pulled it off the shelf and tossed it over to one of the many small engineering firms that the military keeps and maintains to develop ideas, and the engineer who looked it over thought, ‘Wow, this is an interesting idea, not for torpedoes, but for ship-to-ship communications because it was something that couldn’t be jammed.’ So the first application of the Marquee entile invention came in the early nineteen-fifties in the form of a communications system between a plane and what’s called a sun of boy. A boy, of course, is an object that’s floating in the ocean. This particular boy had a sonar system on its underside underwater that would project sonar signals down through the water to listen for submarines. The inventor, who spoke of it later as a very successful invention, said, ‘This was a perfect way, too,’ to make sure we had a signal that was secure between the plane that would fly over and pick up the communications from the saunoboy and from the Saunoboy itself. But pretty quickly, the Navy realized what an efficient way this was to talk from ship-to-ship, and the ships, for example, that were sent down to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in nineteen sixty-two were all fitted with radio systems that used the patent that had been developed by Hetty Lamar and George Entile. After that, it spread through the military; it became a pretty standard communication systems. In the nineteen-seventies, a lot of these World War II and that era military secret inventions were declassified under Jimmy Carter as a way of boosting commercial development of these things, and this invention was picked up and used in some of the early car-telephones, which, of course, preceded the kind of cell-phones we have now, but had a similar problem that was not privacy so much as the fact that if you had one car-telephone talking to another car-telephone on one frequency within a particular given city, there would only be about a hundred frequencies that you could use. That would mean that no more than a couple hundred cars could be talking to each other at the same time, and that obviously was not a commercially viable proposition. But if you could use this jumping frequency hopping as Eddy called it, which came to be called spread-spectrum when they changed it slightly, but it was basically the same idea that you move a signal around among different frequencies. With that, thousands of cars could talk to each other at the same time, and no one would really hear more than an occasional, maybe almost inaudible, blip if two of the signals crossed each other and blotted each other out. Then later on, it was used as the basis for what we call Bluetooth today and still is used in Bluetooth. It didn’t become the basis for all of our cell-phones, primarily because it was slightly more expensive to manufacture the system than it is for the one that she used in cell-phones in the United States, so the manufacturers decided they’d rather go with something that wasn’t quite as good actually, but that didn’t cost them quite so m.