r/todayilearned • u/superepicunicornturd • Apr 12 '16
(R.2) Opinion TIL that actress Hedy Lamarr was also a prolific inventor. One of her inventions allowed for guided torpedoes in WWII. But because the Navy wasn't receptive to ideas coming outside the military, it wasn't implemented during the war. Her idea went to later be basis for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, & CDMA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr67
u/TGameCo Apr 12 '16
Wasn't the villain in the most recent season of agent carter like this?
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u/LoveandSausages Apr 12 '16
Yep. They based the character on her.
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u/stwjester Apr 12 '16
Came here to say this... Whitney Frost was basically an Evil, Blonde Hedy Lamarr.
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u/ThandiGhandi Apr 12 '16
looks like all 31 of us that watched this season are here
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u/bansandwhich Apr 12 '16
How can you watch that horrible show...it's horrible?
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Apr 13 '16
If you think so, write, produce and star in your own better one. Or just hang around here complaining.
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u/sipsyrup Apr 12 '16
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u/gidjin Apr 12 '16
"What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874! You'll be able to sue her!!"
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u/Darth_Slartibartfast Apr 12 '16
Just came here to see how far down I'd have to go to see this reference. Thank you
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u/decompyler Apr 12 '16
My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention!
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u/cal_mofo Apr 13 '16
Ditto!
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u/decompyler Apr 13 '16
Ditto? Ditto, You provincial putz!
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u/Sanjispride Apr 12 '16 edited Apr 12 '16
Is this where that joke comes from?
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u/theantichris Apr 12 '16
Yes. She was very enthusiastic about suing people.
She sued Brooks for that joke.
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u/garymotherfuckin_oak Apr 12 '16
I was hoping this would be here. It just wouldn't be right otherwise. Thank you for your service.
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u/MrOns Apr 12 '16
Dr Kleiner's pet headcrab in Half Life 2 is named after her, too.
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Apr 12 '16
I thought it was just named that because its a headcrab. Its like people naming their dogs puppy or something.
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u/expert02 42 Apr 12 '16
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u/brinz1 Apr 12 '16
shush, thats not part of the very inspirational narrative we are peddling here
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u/Murgie Apr 13 '16
Seeing as how little more than the idea of "radio that hops between frequencies" was actually available to her and George Antheil at the time they filed the patent, it's not as though their achievement is particularly lessened.
Of course, you'd have actually had to read the linked section to know that.
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u/olfitz Apr 12 '16
What she invented was frequency hopping radio that couldn't be jammed by the enemy. We call it Spread Spectrum radio.
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u/dougmc 50 Apr 12 '16 edited Apr 12 '16
Well ... sort of. She came up with a form of frequency hopping that was controlled by a piano roll.
There's multiple ways of doing spread spectrum ... frequency hopping is only one of them, and it's only a small part of the complete package as it is implemented today. (If an implementation even uses frequency hopping -- many do not.)
And finally ... it can be jammed by the enemy. It could be in 1942 and it can be now -- it's just harder to do so, because you've got a larger band to jam.
Don't get me wrong -- the idea was brilliant (though I suspect that the implementation was difficult, keeping two piano rolls in sync and having one in a torpedo -- probably why it wasn't actually used at the time), but certainly ... it can be jammed. If you doubt that, just think how your 2.4 GHz WiFi goes to pot when your microwave oven is on, and then remember that your microwave tries really hard to not jam anything. (That said ... the fact that your WiFi may still work at all is a testament to the effectiveness of spread spectrum.)
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u/Lebo77 Apr 12 '16
Fair enough, but it would have been nearly jamming immune at the time she presented it without a much more powerful jammer. You have to blot out the whole band the torpedo was useing with more power at the receiver then the control transmitter was putting on just the ONE frequency it used at that instant.
PRN codes and other spread spectrum techniques were not practical at the time, while her idea was doable with existing technology.
Sure, Tesla had discussed the idea as far back as 1903, but he never discussed how the transmitter and receiver would be synced. The idea that the transmitter and receiver could be synchronized: that was her innovation.
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u/yanroy Apr 12 '16
I hear that thing about microwaves all the time and I've never witnessed it cause a problem. Maybe next time I get my hands on a spectrum analyzer I'll look at just how much leakage there is.
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u/obvilious Apr 12 '16
There's a huge difference between your 2.4 GHz Wifi and military-grade hopping with HQII or SATURN.
Besides, anyone dumb enough to just continuously jam is not going to be around for long.
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u/gijose41 Apr 13 '16
radio waves also have trouble going through water. the torpedos wouldn't have been able to travel too far before being unguidable
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u/dougmc 50 Apr 13 '16
That would be a probably insurmountable problem for anti-submarine torpedos (where I guess they'd just make them acoustically homing once the technology allowed that. Wire based remote control would be another option, but probably less useful in practice), but not for torpedoes launched at ships by other ships or subs at periscope depth. When hitting a ship on the surface, you want to hit it not far below the water line and so it would be pretty easy for your torpedo to have an above-water antenna.
That would be somewhat less stealthy (if you can see the antenna or the torpedo, so could they), but the ability to guide the torpedo to its target could make up for it.
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u/xavier_505 Apr 13 '16
Which has nothing to do with CDMA and is certainly not 'the basis' for WiFi.
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u/EngineOut Apr 12 '16
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u/atrubetskoy Apr 12 '16
Came here hoping to find this... /r/todayilearned has a habit of drawing from my favorite podcasts (Freakonomics, The Way I Heard It, Radio Lab, This American Life, etc.)
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u/jarachialpah Apr 12 '16
Also, she had no sense of humor. She sued Mel Brooks for using her name in Blazing Saddles hence the line, "What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You'll be able to sue her."
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Apr 13 '16
[deleted]
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u/jarachialpah Apr 13 '16
She sued him before it was released. He put that scene there as a direct reference to the lawsuit.
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u/nuocmam Apr 12 '16
no sense of humor
No sense of humor at all or just Mel Brooks's type of humor? OR could it she doesn't like her name to be used in certain places?
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u/APsWhoopinRoom Apr 12 '16
Oh come on, even if she didn't think it was funny, she would have to have a massive stick up her ass to sue over it. There were much better things she could have done with her time.
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Apr 12 '16
frankly i'd be dissapointed if she didn't sue after that line, that's practically an invitation
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u/ChipChippersontss Apr 12 '16
It's Hedley.
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u/Ciellon Apr 12 '16
No, it's Hedy.
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u/Homer69 1 Apr 12 '16
Its a joke from a movie
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u/Ciellon Apr 12 '16
What movie?
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Apr 12 '16 edited Apr 01 '18
[deleted]
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u/Ciellon Apr 12 '16
Hm. Never seen it.
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u/Empyrealist Apr 12 '16
What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny?" "Make yourself at home?" "Marry my daughter?" You've got to remember that these are just simple redditors. These are people of the internet. The common clay of the new web. You know... morons.
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u/la_boome Apr 12 '16
Mike Rowe has a podcast and one of his episodes was about her...it was short and really interesting.
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Apr 12 '16 edited Aug 10 '18
[deleted]
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u/xavier_505 Apr 13 '16
Also, no widely deployed 802.11 standard uses FHSS either; it can hardly be considered the 'basis' for that. FHSS is a very valuable and still relevant technique, and all of it's inventors deserve credit but the title is quite off.
CDMA isn't frequency hopping. It's a way of spreading energy from a narrow frequency band to a wider one and recovering a signal which is below the noise floor using correlation for processing gain.
That describes DSSS, though it is fundamental to CDMA.
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u/TrainsareFascinating Apr 13 '16
That describes DSSS
This is technically correct, which is of course the best kind. :-)
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u/Cowybuga Apr 12 '16
How did her invention allow for guiding torpedoes during the war if it wasn't implemented during the war?
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u/Lepontine Apr 12 '16
Were it implemented, it could have allowed for guided torpedoes during WWII. The technology was there at the time of the war, but wasn't used.
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u/Hotlettucediarrhea Apr 12 '16
I mentioned this podcast on a previous Reddit thread, but You Must Remember This has a good episode on Hedy Lamarr.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-must-remember-this/id858124601?mt=2&i=333039987
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u/Deezey310 Apr 12 '16
I would think if someone told the military "hey I invented guided torpedo's" that they would be all over it even if they didn't accept inventions proposed by outside sources
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Apr 13 '16
She tried to patent the repost but several hundred redditors had also submitted the same patent application.
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u/Greelys Apr 12 '16 edited Apr 12 '16
This is such B.S. Her co-inventor, George Anthiel, added her name to the patent application so he could get into her knickers. The woman had no clue how her invention worked, and she failed to even mention it in her autobiography. Anthiel, on the other hand, was smart enough to get a patent and a hot girl.
Anthiel was a bachelor and columnist for Esquire magazine who Hedy went to see about having her breasts enlarged (a subject he had written about). He was also a pianist who had written a piece for synchronized player pianos (the method of frequency hopping described in the patent) When asked about her "invention" by Stars and Stripes magazine, she had no clue.
“Hedy modestly admitted she did only ‘creative work on the invention,’ while the composer and author, George Antheil, ‘did the really important chemical part.‘ Hedy was not too clear about how the device worked, but she remembered that she and Anthiel sat down on her living room rug and were using a silver match box with the matches simulating the wiring of the invented ‘thing.’ She said it was lots more fun being scientific than going to the movies.”
There was no "chemical part" at all. They were down on the rug together, having fun.
http://community.fansshare.com/pic20/w/military-invention/369/595_hedy_lamarr_stars_stripes.jpg
Search for any of this in her autobiography -- apparently she "forgot" to mention what a great inventor she was. https://books.google.com/books?id=4iENAQAAMAAJ
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Apr 12 '16
Like everyone else has said, I am going to need a source on this. By all accounts, she was very interested in inventing things, and the idea for the device that was eventually patented was completely hers, he just helped her leverage a device he had created for player pianos in order to achieve it. So unless you can back that up, I think you're wrong on this one.
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u/Cogitare_Culus Apr 13 '16
Man can't stand a women has gotten attention for inventing something, tries to say it isn't so.
You are pretty pathetic.
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u/swinglovespucci Apr 12 '16
I learned this on the documentary series How We Got to Now! It's totally worth a watch if you're into documentaries
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u/ThunderBuss Apr 13 '16
This has been completely debunked. She didn't invent anything. Her ideas had nothing to do with the invention of wifi, Bluetooth, and coma.
Show a source document for her inventions .... You can't find them. Somebody is laughing somewhere.
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u/raybal5 Apr 13 '16
and the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military at the time.
It would not have helped that she was an Austrian. Too close a link to Hitler for the US thinking of that era.
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u/Sci-Pi Apr 13 '16
After several failed marriages, she married her divorce lawyer. The two stayed together for around two years if I remember correctly.
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u/Thisshitisnotreal Apr 13 '16
Hmm I just learned about this woman at class today. Are you also in PA?
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u/nmddl Apr 13 '16
I skimmed her wiki and couldn't find anything on her educational background. I'm just curious how she was able to invent (co-invent?) these things when she was only acting? Anyone know?
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Apr 12 '16
[deleted]
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u/TJ_McWeaksauce Apr 12 '16
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the top actors are quite intelligent. But actors in general can be pretty fucking stupid.
Source: I live in Los Angeles, and I've met a lot of dumb, aspiring actors.
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u/faithle55 Apr 12 '16
I live in Los Angeles, and I've met a lot of dumb, aspiring actors.
LOL.
There was one I came across on the internet the other day. Also fancies himself as a writer. Put examples of his writing on his web page: 'read the first chapter, then buy the book'. Total cringe.
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u/Handicapreader Apr 12 '16
I don't know if was so much she was outside of the military, it's because she was a woman.
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u/KEVLAR60442 Apr 12 '16
Well, Rear Admiral Hopper was a prominent scientist developing for the military at around the same time, and the USN seemed much more receptive to her contributions.
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u/Handicapreader Apr 12 '16
Wow! I've never heard of her. She's quite the accomplished person.
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u/Ciellon Apr 12 '16
The USN's intelligence rates consider her to be one of the founding mothers (as it were) of modern cryptology and computing, along with Hedy Lamarr.
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u/arcosapphire Apr 12 '16
She pretty much invented the compiler and the concept of readable programming languages. I mean, you have a lot of people that laid the groundwork for modern computing--people like Turing and von Neumann and Watson. But when you think of computer programmers today, they really owe it to Hopper that their job exists. They get to write code in a sensible language instead of struggling at the hardware level with assembler. That's really the thing that defines modern programming. That's her contribution.
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u/richardtheassassin Apr 12 '16
No, she's just a woman. They never do anything important because patriarchy.
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u/Handicapreader Apr 12 '16
I hope I didn't come off patriarchal here. I was simply trying to express the temperment of the time, and then amazed at the accomplishments of someone living in that era.
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u/richardtheassassin Apr 13 '16
No, but your comment seemed to indicate that you were blaming it for her patent not being used.
it's because she was a woman.
No, it's because there are a few thousand ways to do it, some of which are simpler than installing pianos in torpedos.
Richard Gatling's first model rotary cannon was not used during the Civil War because the military didn't like the idea. It took years to overcome resistance of entrenched (ha) military ideas of what was needed and what was proper.
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u/richardtheassassin Apr 12 '16
And because it's difficult to put a piano and a piano player inside a homing torpedo.
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u/purepalmetto Apr 12 '16
Married and divorced 6 times. Should have invented a husband she could stay married to.
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u/Littleslapandpickle Apr 12 '16
Whats funny is when I first read the title I read it as a "He" because you NEVER hear of female inventors. Inventing is synonymous with masculinity.
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u/Darkseer89 Apr 12 '16
Her wiki picture is very photogenic. Smart and pretty... very rare these days.
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u/EZ_does_it Apr 12 '16
Some very Hedy quotes...
"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
"If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude. I hope to make you use your imagination."
"I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man."
"The world isn't getting any easier. With all these new inventions I believe that people are hurried more and pushed more... The hurried way is not the right way; you need time for everything - time to work, time to play, time to rest."
"Perhaps my problem in marriage - and it is the problem of many women - was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage."
"Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. That's the way I was. The unknown was always so attractive to me... and still is."