[BITList] Great true story!!!! Her dinner with Hitler & and her ingenious inve...

[Malcolm]

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.
Pushing well beyond the social norms of the period, the movie also featured
a simulated orgasm. To make the scene "vivid," the director reportedly
stabbed the actress with a sharp pin just off-screen.

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, snuck out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes, and sold her
jewellery 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 adviser 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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