Celebrating Hedy Lamarr (November 9 Google Doodle)
We love highlighting great stories about women’s achievements in science and technology. When the story involves a 1940s Hollywood star-turned-inventor who helped develop technologies we all use with our smartphones today … well, we just have to share it with the world.
Today on Google’s homepage we’re celebrating Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress Hollywood once dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Lamarr’s own story reads like a movie script: bored by the film industry and feeling typecast, Lamarr was more interested in helping the Allied war effort as World War II broke out than in the roles she was being offered. She had some background in military munitions (yes, really), and together with a composer friend, George Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked (yep, pianos) to identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio signals. The patent for “frequency hopping” Lamarr co-authored laid the groundwork for widely-used technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and wifi that we rely upon daily.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/celebrating-hedy-lamarr.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Spread-spectrum! Where would satellite communications or cell tech be without Hedy.
Obligatory cultural reference here:
It's not Hedy. It's Hedley! 
R&K
Thanks! 
Sorry if the partial nudity offends anyone. I did try to just post the link to the photo.
Pages and pages of pics start here http://ravepad.com/page/hedy-lamarr/images/type/photo/1
In 1940, Lamarr met the American avant-garde composer George Antheil, who just returned to America from Paris, where he had created a sensation pushing the boundaries of classical music. Among his more outrageous compositions was one in which he placed a number of player-pianos on the stage, each producing “canned” sounds. For us the relevance of this story is that Lamarr later emigrated to the US and became a fiercely patriotic champion of the Allied cause after America’s entry into World War II in 1941. While living in Austria she had been married to an industrialist named Fritz Mandl, and over dinner conversations he had with his colleagues, she became acquainted with some of the advanced weapons the Nazis would later employ to such great effect. Among them were radio-controlled glide bombs—the predecessors to the “smart bombs” so much in the news today. Inspired by Antheil’s compositions, she came up with the notion of using perforated paper tape (not as wide as a player-piano roll), to rapidly switch the frequency of the transmitter on a ship that launched the torpedo. An identical tape on the torpedo would switch, or “hop,” the frequency of the receiver, to match the transmitter. Think of a car radio, with which you can rapidly select a radio station by pushing a button, and not twist the tuning dial. The technique depended on the precise synchronization of the two tapes, but for a torpedo that only had to work for a short period of time. And of course it depended on the enemy’s not knowing the sequence of frequency hopping—the sequence had to appear random, although it was not.
Lamar applied for and was granted a patent for a “secret communication system” in 1942, but the Navy did not use her invention. Decades later it was rediscovered and became the basis for secure communications. The paper tapes are now replaced by digital computer circuits, which generate sequences of “pseudo-random numbers” (PRN) that hop the frequencies of the transmitter and receiver in synch. Because the technique requires a wider band of frequencies than a normal radio transmission (think again of the car radio), it is called “spread spectrum,” as it spreads the signal across a wider band.
http://blog.nasm.si.edu/space/gps-a-hollywood-actress-a-player-piano-and-hip-hop/
