Taking A Look Outside Our Window

By Mary O’KEEFE

I am going to try to explain my thought process which can be difficult to follow at times but please stay with me.  March is Women’s History Month, and for the next four weeks I want to highlight some incredibly strong, intelligent and innovative women.  Of course I will not be able to highlight all the great women which is why I need to explain my thought process.

A few days ago I had asked a friend a question via text. I didn’t get a response, so I texted again, still no answer. It was a time sensitive issue and I needed an answer quickly so I called my friend and asked her if she had received any of my texts. She said she had and apologized for not responding. I started thinking about how dependent I was on my phone.

I am old enough to remember when we didn’t have a smart phone embedded into our soul but now I have to admit I am so dependent that I will check the weather app before looking out the window to see if it is raining. That got me to ponder how we got to this point, where our whole lives seem to be swirling around these small electronic devices and that, of course, led me to Hedy Lamarr…a natural progression right?

Lamarr was an Austrian American actress from the 1930s to the late1950s.

She made films in Austria but her real fame came from American films in the 1940s like “Ziegfeld Girl” and “Samson and Delilah.” She was beautiful, graceful and a genius.

As the story goes—-Lamarr’s father inspired her to use her mind. They would take walks and discuss inventions like the printing press or street cars. She loved taking things apart like her music box, just to see how it operated. But Lamarr was also very beautiful and that trait took center stage as she began her acting career.

In the 1930s after acting in few films in Austria, Lamarr married a munitions manufacturer as Nazi rule was just making its way to power. Being the good wife, she would listen to her husband and his friends talk of war machines. She was not exactly the “trophy wife” type and as the war became imminent she escaped Austria and her husband. She went to England where she met film producer Louis B. Mayer, went off to Hollywood, and became a star. But that didn’t mean she stopped inventing and being curious.

She wanted to do something to help the US during WWII. She and friend George Anthiel, a musician, came up with an idea of frequency hopping.

Frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS)  transmission is the repeated switching of a carrier frequency during a radio transmission to reduce interference and avoid interception. Lamarr and Anthiel were awarded the patent in August, 1942. They had initially thought the communication system could be used to guide torpedos to their targets during WWII, however the Navy decided against using the new system until decades later during the Cuban Missile Crisis and other operations. This technique is also the basis of cordless phones, cellphones, wifi and global positioning systems.

According to reports some men tried to discredit Lamarr for the patent, some calling her a plagiarist claiming her former husband had to have come up with the engineering idea. Yet no one else patented the technology but Lamarr. As film historian Jeanine Basinger said of the men’s opposition to Lamarr’s engineering skills  “You don’t get to be Hedy Lamarr and smart.”

According to other reports she had wanted to join the Inventor’s Council formed to help fight the Nazis but was told she would be of better use selling kisses and dances for war bonds.

But Lamarr continued to invent and discover. She dated Howard Hughes, but seem more interested in his innovations that his wealth, and Hughes saw her brilliance. He took her to his airplane factories and let her see how planes were built. Hughes wanted to create faster planes, Lamarr studied fish and birds and came up with a new wing design for Hughes’ planes.

“She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola,” according to womenshistory.org.

It wasn’t until in her later years that Lamarr was recognized for her  inventions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted in 2014 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

And by the way, she also helped the war effort with her celebrity by selling $25 million in war bonds.

It’s probably fair to say we are looking at our phones more often lately to check the future weather, to see if the rain will stop for a while.

According to NOAA meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld, we will be seeing some dryer days but they will be cold. The rain that fell Tuesday to Wednesday was expected to bring about one to two inches to the area but from now until Tuesday, we should have cloudy skies but no rain.

It will be cold, with today’s high expected in the upper 50s but a wind chill value as low as in the 30s. The highs will be in the upper 50s to low 60s from Friday to Tuesday with the lows in the low 40s.

  Mary Okeefe