Subject: Dinner with Hitler---a very
interesting story
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A
very, very interesting tidbit from history.
It all started with a skin flick...
In
1933, a beautiful, young Austrian woman took off her clothes for a movie
director. She ran through the woods... naked. She swam in a lake... naked.
The
most popular movie in 1933 was King Kong. But everyone in Hollywood was
talking about that scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.
Louis B. Mayer, of the giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The film was banned practically everywhere... which of course made it even more popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price.
The
star of the film, called Ecstasy, was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of
her beauty was "to stand there and look stupid." In reality,
Kiesler was anything but stupid. She was a genius. She'd grown up as the only
child of a prominent Jewish banker. She was a math prodigy. She excelled at
science. As she grew
older, she became ruthless, using all the power her body and mind gave her. Between the sexual roles she played, her tremendous beauty, and the power of her intellect, Kiesler would confound the men in her life... including her six husbands, two of the most ruthless dictators of the 20th century, and one of the greatest movie producers in history.
Her
beauty made her rich for a time. She is said to have made - and spent - $30
million in her life. But her greatest accomplishment resulted from her
intellect... and her invention continues to shape the world we live in today.
You
see, this young Austrian starlet would take one of the most valuable
technologies ever developed right from under Hitler's nose. After fleeing to
America, she not only became a major Hollywood star... her name sits on one
of the most important patents ever granted by the U.S. Patent Office.
Today,
when you use your cell phone or, over the next few years, as you experience
super-fast wireless Internet access (via something called "long-term
evolution" or "LTE" technology), you'll be using an extension
of the technology a 20- year-old actress first conceived while sitting at
dinner with Hitler.
At
the time she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in
Austria. Friedrich Mandl was Austria's leading arms maker. His firm would
become a key supplier to the Nazis.
Mandl
used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners
with representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces. One
of Mandl's favorite topics at these gatherings - which included meals with
Hitler and Mussolini - was the technology surrounding radio-controlled
missiles and torpedoes. Wireless weapons offered far greater ranges than the
wire-controlled alternatives that prevailed at the time. Kiesler sat through
these dinners "looking stupid," while absorbing everything she
heard...
As
a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis. She abhorred her husband's business
ambitions. Mandl responded to his wilful wife by imprisoning her in his
castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape. She drugged her
maid, slipped out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes, and sold her
jewelry to finance a trip to London. (She got out just in time.
In
1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl's factory. He was half
Jewish. Mandl fled to Brazil. Later, he became an advisor to Argentina's
iconic populist president, Juan Peron.)
In
London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a
long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM's biggest stars. She
appeared in more than 20 films. She was a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy
Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first seven MGM movies was a
blockbuster.
But
Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies. At
the height of her fame, in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications
system, optimized for sending coded messages that couldn't be
"jammed." She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and
guided bombs to always reach their targets. She was building a system to kill
Nazis.
By
the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the kind of
single- frequency radio-controlled technology Kiesler's ex-husband had been
peddling. The drawback of this technology was that the enemy could find the
appropriate frequency and "jam" or intercept the signal, thereby
interfering with the missile's intended path.
Kiesler's
key innovation was to "change the channel." It was a way of
encoding a message across a broad area of the wireless spectrum. If one part
of the spectrum was jammed, the message would still get through on one of the
other frequencies being used. The problem was, she could not figure out how
to synchronize the frequency changes on both the receiver and the
transmitter. To solve the problem, she turned to perhaps the world's first
techno-musician, George Anthiel.
Anthiel
was an acquaintance of Kiesler who achieved some notoriety for creating
intricate musical compositions. He synchronized his melodies across twelve
player pianos, producing stereophonic sounds no one had ever heard before.
Kiesler incorporated Anthiel's technology for synchronizing his player
pianos. Then, she was able to synchronize the frequency changes between a
weapon's receiver and its transmitter.
On
August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and
"Hedy Kiesler Markey," which was Kiesler's married name at the
time.
Most of you won't recognize the name Kiesler. And no one would remember the name Hedy Markey. But it's a fair bet than anyone reading this newsletter of a certain age will remember one of the great beauties of Hollywood's golden age ~ Hedy Lamarr. That's the name Louis B. Mayer gave to his prize actress. That's the name his movie company made famous.
Meanwhile,
almost no one knows Hedwig Kiesler - aka Hedy Lamarr - was one of the great
pioneers of wireless communications. Her technology was developed by the U.S.
Navy, which has used it ever since.
You're
probably using Lamarr's technology, too. Her patent sits at the foundation of
"spread spectrum technology," which you use every day when you log
on to a wi- fi network or make calls with your Bluetooth-enabled phone. It
lies at the heart of the massive investments being made right now in
so-called fourth-generation "LTE" wireless technology. This next
generation of cell phones and cell towers will provide tremendous increases
to wireless network speed and quality, by spreading wireless signals across
the entire available spectrum. This kind of encoding is only possible using
the kind of frequency switching that Hedwig Kiesler invented.
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