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Hedy Lamarr: The Jewish Actress Whose Technical Wizardry Made Wi-Fi Possible

Nov. 27 2017

The subject of a recent documentary, the Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr was one of cinema’s first female sex symbols; her best known Hollywood role was that of the titular temptress in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. But her greatest contribution might well have been in engineering, as co-inventor of a technique for communicating across radio frequencies. Lamarr kept her Jewish origins a secret for most of her career—even her children were surprised to learn of it. In his review of the documentary, J. Hoberman writes:

Hers was a particular sort of Jewish life. Hedwig Kiesler was the only child of wealthy Jewish parents living in Döbling, an affluent, heavily Jewish neighborhood in north-central Vienna. Her father was a bank manager; her mother a would-be concert pianist who converted to Catholicism. Hedy attended a predominantly Jewish secondary school whose students had included Sigmund Freud’s daughters. . . .

Hedy married the millionaire munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, a seller of arms to Nazi Germany despite his Jewish heritage. The wedding was Catholic; the marriage was stormy. Hedy escaped Mandl and Austria on her third attempt, a year ahead of the German Anschluss. After a brief time in London, where she attracted the attention of Louis B. Mayer, she arrived in America at twenty-two, with no English, a new last name, and a contract with MGM. . . .

Her hobby was inventing . . . and as war broke out in Europe, she sought to invent something that would help defeat the Nazis. Together with [the composer George] Antheil, the twenty-six-year-old Lamarr developed plans for a radio-controlled torpedo that by switching from one frequency to another, could elude enemy detection and jamming. (The idea for frequency-hopping came in part from Antheil’s attempt to synchronize player pianos; the knowledge of weaponry was Lamarrr’s.) . . .

Their plan for a guided torpedo reached the U.S. Navy [in 1941] and was rejected as too heavy—although the Patent Office did issue two patents on the Antheil-Lamarr “secret communication system.” The Navy acquired the patents and did nothing until, once expired around 1960, the plans became the basis for the similar “spread-spectrum” technology that would ultimately lead to wi-fi, surveillance drones, satellite communications, GPS, and many cordless phones.

Read more at Tablet

More about: History & Ideas, Hollywood, Technology, World War II

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic