HEDY'S FOLLY: When History Gets Rewired
Hedy Lamarr was brilliant. The historiography surrounding her invention is a rabbit hole of half-truths and omissions
7/27/24: Thanks are owed to David Rand Irvin, who graciously approached me with some corrections and clarifications about his research and patent law.
History is a dark sea on which we lay our tiny floating walkways. Each fact is usually the product of extended struggle — months of someone’s time spent wrestling with documents to hone an understanding of the truth. More effort still is spent building consensus, promulgating and repeating information, until finally the “fact” becomes a public scaffolding of citations, webpages, books, and textbooks.
This piece was originally written as a tangent within a forthcoming review of the insidious, media-darling book that is Shakespeare Was a Woman. But as I moved deeper into the web of historiography that surrounds Hedy Lamarr’s radio frequency invention, the story became so complicated as to take up a post of its own.
I know many of you follow me for sci-fi commentary — rest assured! This post has plentiful connections to midcentury science and science-fiction. As it turns out, Theodore Sturgeon and Hedy Lamarr shared an interest in frequency-hopping missile technology.
Hedy Lamarr is often called the “mother of wi-fi,” in some form or another. The contours of the agreed story look like this.
At the height of World War Two, Lamarr and her colleague George Antheil invented “frequency hopping,” the concept of a radio transmission that jumps between a broad range of frequencies. At the time, this was revolutionary in the world of radio communications — a transmission on a single frequency is easy for an enemy to trace and jam, but a transmission that jumped between varying frequencies would be much more difficult to interfere with. Lamarr and Antheil also developed the first means of synchronizing the radio transmitter and receiver, so that both devices would change their frequency settings simultaneously, continuously, and automatically.
Lamarr and Antheil proposed that this “frequency hopping” should be used for radio-controlled torpedoes, to render them jam-proof. They filed a patent and presented their invention to the U.S. Navy. While the Navy expressed initial interest, it abandoned the idea, but at some point acquired the patent. In the ensuing decades, the Lamarr-Antheil patent circulated quietly amongst military engineers and contractors; its attributes were used and adapted into spread sequence frequency hopping (SSFH). Decades later, SSFH technologies and concepts went on to form the basis of our current wi-fi and Bluetooth technologies.
Because Hedy Lamarr was a starlet in the 1940s (she remarked famously that her beauty was a “curse”) and filed the patent under her married name, Markey, her scientific contributions and links to SSFH were forgotten by her peers and used without due credit. But in the 80s and 90s, awareness campaigns started to bring her story to light within the telecommunications community. In 1997, thanks to the activism of Dave Hughes, Lamarr was honored with a Pioneer Award. And in 2011, historian Richard Rhodes cemented the story in the general consciousness with Hedy’s Folly, a biography centered on Lamarr’s seminal impact on modern telecommunications. Hedy’s Folly formed the basis for the documentary Bombshell, as well as a play (HEDY!) and picture books like Hedy Lamarr’s Double Life and Hedy and Her Amazing Invention.
Today, Lamarr’s status as an inventor is arguably more well-known than her oeuvre as an actor. She features in a myriad of books, posters, and merchandise about accomplished women: Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers, Bad Girls Throughout History, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, and more. “If it wasn’t for Hedy Lamarr, we wouldn’t have Wi-Fi,” summarizes The Guardian. The National Women’s History Museum writes that “Lamarr… pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems.” The Smithsonian, which houses correspondence about Lamarr’s patent, echoes this claim. Eventually, the fun fact became household knowledge. Even my surly neighbor Mr. P, a staunch conservative and no fan of historical revisionism, remarked to me: “I bet you didn’t know Hedy Lamarr invented what they use for wi-fi.” But of course I did. Everybody did: it was an inescapable bit of public knowledge.
What was the original Lamarr-Antheil invention? Described as a “Secret Communications System,” it envisioned a torpedo being guided by radio control, carried out in an programmed sequence of 88 alternating frequencies. This sequence would be controlled by the kind of perforated “ribbon” that was also used in mechanical player pianos. The strip (basically acting as the music that would “play” each different frequency) would roll simultaneously in both the transmitter and the receiver, ensuring that frequency changes were synchronized. (A pin and spring would ensure that the receiver and transmitter rolls started to turn at exactly the same time.)
Lamarr’s collaborator Antheil, an avant-garde composer, was inspired by his own work with mechanical pianos; his Ballet Mechanique from the 1920s involved 13 such programmed instruments. But Antheil was confident that, unlike its inspirations, the radio device he and Lamarr invented would be as small and light as a “dollar watch.”
We know that the idea took form in late 1940, and that Lamarr and Antheil were in contact with the National Inventors Council, a group encouraging civilian contributions to the war, in 1940-1941; this is documented in their correspondence, Antheil’s autobiography, and media coverage in The New York Times.
The invention was cleared by the Council and forwarded to the Navy, which ultimately passed on the idea.1 The U.S. Patent Office granted a patent (number 2,292,387) to the Secret Communications System in August 1942. You can view the final approved form of the patent at the Patent Office website (Lamarr used her married name, H. Kiesler Markey).
In the chapters of Hedy’s Folly that cover the invention, Richard Rhodes acts in the mode of a narrator-cum-lawyer, laying out the case that Lamarr was the originator of “frequency hopping” as a concept. According to Rhodes, the Lamarr-Antheil torpedo device was merely a specific application of their larger conceptual “breakthrough.”2 “Hedy’s original idea” transcended the specific gadget and would encompass future devices that used a programmed, automatic sequence of frequencies. In short, “they filed their patent application not merely for a radio-controlled torpedo but for a much broader, pioneering, and fundamental ‘Secret Communications System.’”3
This broader concept is laid out in Lamarr and Antheil’s patent application. (Though Rhodes doesn’t mention how he came by the patent application, it can be inferred that he either (1) located the application in an archive somewhere, or (2) received it amongst documents that he was sent by Lamarr’s son.) Rhodes quotes a passage from the patent application that has since been identified as Claim 7. Claim 7 would patent any
radio communication system comprising a radio transmitter tunable to any one of a plurality of frequencies and a radio receiver tunable to any one of said plurality of frequencies… effecting secret communication between said stations… according to an arbitrary, nonrecurring pattern.
Basically, Claim 7 of the application would have patented frequency hopping. The tone of Hedy’s Folly is assertive and persuasive; Rhodes repeats that the FH concept was Lamarr’s, “entirely original.”4 He’s adamant that when they were granted patent 2,292,387, “a broad and fundamental patent now existed for a frequency-hopping radio system.”5
Hedy’s Folly, when it came out in 2011, struck a large cultural note. In a world waking up to the historical erasure of female scientists, its central narrative felt infuriatingly familiar: woman invents thing, men belittle woman, men proceed to use woman’s idea without credit. The book was largely praised, and the popularity of Lamarr’s story accelerated in the mid-2010s: demand for girl-power/steminist products and cultural narratives exploded, tied to causes like the Clinton campaign, Women’s March, and #MeToo. In 2016, Hidden Figures sold a quarter-million copies alongside the release of the film. Chelsea Clinton turned Elizabeth Warren’s “she persisted” slogan into a line of picture books about historical women exemplars and inventors. Hedy’s Folly and its narrative about a wronged female genius fit right in; the larger rising tide lifted its boat.
But as the popularity of the story grew, a small number of skeptics began to air their disagreements about its core assertions. Many were part of the radio and programming communities and questioned whether Lamarr’s device was used in future SSFH technologies. They also asked whether Lamarr really invented frequency hopping as a concept, as Rhodes, Hughes, and their colleagues claimed.
In 2019, physicist/writer/professor Tony Rothman consolidated the errors in a detailed refutation published in American Scientist. Rothman contradicts several counterfactual claims made by Rhodes,6 and demonstrates that Hedy’s Folly’s central thesis — that Lamarr invented the concept of frequency hopping itself — is false. Rothman provides numerous examples of inventors, mathematicians, and scientists throughout the early 20th century who had been creating their own versions of frequency hopping; the concept was certainly discussed and theorized. In Wireless Telegraphy, a widely-known trade book published in 1908 (1915 in English translation) Jonathan Zenneck describes the basic concept (“vary[ing] the wave-length in accordance with a prearranged program, perhaps automatically”) as something that was known by his contemporaries; it was inconvenient — but not impossible — to implement. Zenneck, three decades before Lamarr’s invention, mentions that the German radio company Telefunken had implemented a frequency-hopping system (although it’s difficult to tell what degree of complexity this system would have had.)
You can actually find Zenneck’s book cited in Rhodes’ bibliography.7 Regarding this discrepancy, I’d say that Wireless Telegraphy is simply a massive book and Rhodes thus may have missed the significant passage on “varied wavelengths.” He also may have assessed the methods described by Zenneck as too rudimentary to constitute an early form of frequency hopping.
One of Rhodes’ sources is Robert A. Scholtz’s seminal paper “The Origin of Spread-Spectrum Communications” (1982). In the paper, Scholtz identifies several early patents in the 20s and 30s that functioned with the basic attributes of a spread spectrum, and concludes that “frequency hopping and, to a similar extent, time hopping were recognized… concepts during the early 1940s.” This is ambiguous, and doesn’t prove or disprove anything about Lamarr potentially being the first. But the overall takeaway from Scholtz is that it’s impossible to attribute the origins of SS technologies to single individuals or projects; concepts were often ideated before they were practical; ideas floated amongst communities of engineers; the War was a crucible that intensified collaboration, imitation, and alteration. Scholtz phrases it memorably: “the blood lines of these system families are not pure.”8
Tony Rothman points out other patents for what could be called FH predated the Lamarr-Antheil device, specifically concepts by Ellison Purington (1940) and Willem Broertjes (1932). A team at AT&T patented a device for the “transmission of signals on a plurality of waves of different frequencies” using a perforated tape like Antheil’s in 1926.9 During and after World War Two, many other inventions and government programs evolved into future radio technologies (some secondary sources from the nineties, before Hedy’s Folly, actually concede this).
From there, you’d think that the central argument of Hedy’s Folly had been disproven. And a huge part of it seemed to be: specifically the claim that Lamarr invented frequency hopping. But Rothman’s piece also makes an accidental omission of its own. It does not discuss any specific, future use of the Lamarr-Antheil patent in the context of military or radio innovation. Rothman only cites those programs (such as BLADES) whose records show no use of the Lamarr-Antheil patent, such that a reader approaching Rothman’s piece without context might come away with the assumption that there is no smoking gun to prove the Lamarr-Antheil patent was ever utilized in future SSFH. But there is (kind of).
R. I. Ścibor-Marchocki was an engineer, computer scientist, and Navy contractor active after World War Two. In the year 2000, he stated on a post on his personal website that in 1954, the Navy provided him a copy of the Lamarr-Antheil patent after it contracted him to develop a new tech for its Sonobuoys. As it existed, the Sonobuoy project was basically a network of buoys that used sonar to detect submarines and would transmit their readings via radio to airplanes overhead. It was highly sensitive data; hence, the need for secure transmissions. Ścibor-Marchocki recalls:
When we received the contract to develop the Sonobuoy, we were provided with a copy of the H. Kiesler Markey patent. Since it was dated a decade previously, we assumed that it was an existing secret technology, devised by some clever electrical engineer, working under a Navy contract and thus obligated to assign the patent to the Navy.
As requested, we designed the radio communications following the concept of the patent. It worked and worked very well, from the beginning.
Ścibor-Marchocki altered certain elements of the device from the patent — for example, he replaced the perforated rolls with a pronged, rotating cylinder that would “play” alternating frequencies, similar to the cylinders used in music boxes. Although the Sonobuoy concept was eventually abandoned, Ścibor-Marchocki himself went on to make profound contributions to future SSFH technologies: most importantly, he developed the first digital SSFH system, which enabled the concept to be applied on a much wider (and eventually civilian) scale.
Richard Rhodes spends a chapter on Ścibor-Marchocki in Hedy’s Folly, with good reason: Ścibor-Marchocki is a proven connection between the Lamarr-Antheil device and the community of engineers who would go on to develop more advanced and influential forms of SSFH technology. Furthermore, Ścibor-Marchocki’s story proves that someone up in the Navy had taken note of the Lamarr-Antheil patent and recognized its usefulness.
But there are crucial caveats to Ścibor-Marchocki’s story. He states that the frequency-hopper of the receiver needed “constant maintenance,” contributing to the Sonobuoy’s impracticality (the project was discontinued). He unfortunately makes no mention of whether his experience with the Lamarr-Antheil patent influenced his future work with SSFH, or if he had any elements of the patent in mind when his team pioneered digital SSFH decades later.10 It may be possible that the patent influenced other projects; it’s also possible that the legacy of the Lamarr-Antheil patent died with the Sonobuoy. Ścibor-Marchocki (to the best of my knowledge) is deceased. I want to note that, outside of technological achievements,11 he lived a vibrant life in California; was a member of Mensa, the NRA, zoo organizations, and the Naturist Society (“nude and natural!”); adored long walks in his avocado orchard with his five “companion bitches” — dogs; and regularly attended the San Bernadino Renaissance Pleasure Faire in the role of a peasant.
By the 50s, SSFH was reaching a fully-developed form and being implemented by the military. Robert Scholtz, in his paper, excerpts a 1957 novelette by Theodore Sturgeon in which aliens have used a form of SSFH for missile guidance. It reads like a sci-fi version of the Lamarr-Antheil torpedo system. (“There’s a synchronous generator in the missiles that reproduces the same random noise, peak by pulse. Once you do that, modulation’s no problem. I don’t know how they do it. They just do.”) Highly recommend the story, with reasons in this footnote.12
Was the Lamarr-Antheil patent even brough up in the Navy’s future developments of SSFH? Had someone from those early discussions between Antheil, the National Inventors Council, and the Navy remembered the invention and thought about it after the war? Was the patent shown to other engineers besides Ścibor-Marchocki? These are the great what-ifs, whose answers might have (could still, if unearthed) establish a thru-line from Lamarr’s device to later developments in SSFH, and the extent (if any) to which it was developed.
Recently, an independent researcher/patent expert/engineer named David Rand Irvin inspected a number of archival materials relating to the Lamarr-Antheil patent. He delved into collections at the Smithsonian and U.S. Patent Office, and discovered some important evidence, which he discusses in a paper in a pre-publication version made available online in February 2024. Irvin was able to track down primary documents related to the patent process that reveal how the patent was perceived at the time.
The Patent Office files consisted of the patent application (which is cited by Rhodes), the final patent, and a wrapper with numerous office notes and documents — especially concerning Claim 7. As it turns out, Claim 7 was rejected by the patent examiner on the grounds that the SSFH concept was already covered by prior patents, Willem Broertjes’ from 1932 (patent 1,869,659) and Martin Baesecke’s from 1938 (2,134,850), “for obvious reasons.” The Patent Office also preserves a response from Lamarr and Antheil’s lawyers, Lyon & Lyon, accepting that Claim 7 be stricken from the final patent.13
Using the Smithsonian Archives, Irvin went through the Lamarr/Antheil Invention Papers. The collection has Antheil’s notebook and early sketches from 1940-1941, along with patent documentation and correspondence. In the correspondence between the inventors and Lyon & Lyon, the lawyers explain that Claim 7 could not be patented; they admit that they had anticipated its rejection. They also express puzzlement at the press leak about the “red-hot” device (from Lamarr’s PR team or someone close to it?): why was the National Inventors Council touting a secrecy order that had never existed? The situation was odd, all-around.
With the consent of Lamarr and Antheil, the final patent was accepted and processed, and Claim 7 was dropped. In its final form, the patent consists of 6 claims that pertain to the torpedo/roll device. Patent 2,292,387 is publicly available in both the Patent Office and Smithsonian collections (or the link above).
Basically, Irvin’s research shows what should have been glaringly obvious from the beginning: whether or not you think Claim 7 should have been accepted as patentable, it never was. Rhodes’ claim — that a “broad and fundamental patent now existed for a frequency-hopping radio system” — seems not to have been based on the final patent, but on an earlier version that was rejected.
It’s difficult to say if Rhodes knew about this discrepancy. Diagrams from the final form of Patent 2,292,387 certainly appear in Hedy’s Folly; the U.S. Patent Office is cited as the source. Maybe the papers Rhodes received from Lamarr’s son didn’t include a copy of the official patent, and Rhodes declined to check if the application matched the final version in the Patent Office. Maybe it was up to the staff at Doubleday to acquire the images, and it was beyond the scope of their work to closely analyze through the patent’s text. No fact checker is mentioned in the Acknowledgements of Hedy’s Folly.
Despite encouragement from Lyon & Lyon to explore alternate versions of the device, and despite Lamarr’s wishes to design a lighter version to appease the Navy, she and Antheil abandoned the project. Lamarr pivoted to selling war bonds in a more traditional celebrity style. Ownership of the patent (as Irvin found in his investigation) passed to the U.S. government, since Lamarr was a foreign national from Austria — the policy affected thousands of patents, and did not appear to be motivated by any kind of hush-up or specific interest in the patent. Despite Rhodes’ claims that the patent was spirited away, Raiders of the Lost Ark style (in Bombshell, he says that the patent “was put in a safe somewhere and labeled Top Secret”), the patent remained publicly available.14 It expired in 1959.
The most depressing aspect of the story surrounding the Lamarr-Antheil device is that it seemed to have a negative emotional effect on those involved. By the 90s, Lamarr had come to believe that her invention and herself had been used without due credit. Fleming Meeks of Forbes interviewed her in 1990; she made clear that she felt wronged:
I can’ t understand… why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world… Never a letter, never a thank-you, never money… I don’t know. I guess they just take and forget about a person.
It’s unclear how closely Lamarr kept track of radio communications or her own invention over the latter half of the 20th century (Hedy’s Folly condenses the period from 1950-1990 in to a single paragraph.) Her son has a letter from 1969 in which she asks a Navy friend what happened to the torpedo patent; we don’t have the response.15 In other matters, she was litigious and outspoken: decrying the salacious ghostwritten memoir Ecstasy and Me, suing in response to the “Hedly Lamarr” jokes in Blazing Saddles. But (from what I was able to find) she never publicly commented on the patent or frequency hopping until the narrative began to pick up steam in the 80s and 90s amongst journalists who brought the issue to her family’s attention.16 The evolution of Lamarr’s perspective in her own words — how and why she came to believe her patent had been widely used and her work exploited — has been lost to time. She was planning a definitive autobiography; it never happened. The documentary Bombshell states: “Hedy’s family believed she died without telling her story.”
In his essay on frequency hopping, Rothman writes that “the ideas prevailed, not the individuals.” Using this phrasing, one could say that, over the course of the 2010s, an idea of Hedy Lamarr prevailed. Despite her bevy of talent (she spoke several languages, was a skilled actor, painted, and allegedly patented other varied inventions — “I have little shelves in my brain,” she said),17 the image of Lamarr as a well-rounded Hollywood star was not enough: her story had to be consolidated under a single great-man type achievement.
This embellished narrative fit in well with what our shared imagination envisioned of a wronged female scientist. What’s more, the testimonies that would seem to matter most in proving the Lamarr-Antheil patent’s importance — military records, firsthand accounts from midcentury engineers and programmers like R. I. Ścibor-Marchocki who may (or may not) have used its concepts — are either still classified, lost, or simply too obscure to be found. It’s also likely, as happens often in the history of trades, that no one recorded anything about the inspiration/creative development of this or that invention at all.
The people who have countered the claims in Hedy’s Folly have been few, often without the media reach necessary to make headway. The subject itself is opaque and difficult to write about in a digestible way; it dwells in faded reports and defunct patents that make no sense to 99% of people. Larger conversations about the patent and device have barely breached Reddit, let alone major news outlets.
My personal opinion — which feels inappropriate to add, given the erring nature of all the historiography I’ve been discussing — is that the Lamarr-Antheil patent was an intelligent contribution to the advancement of SSFH. It delivered solutions to a problem in the form of a mechanism that other scientists may not have considered, and was part of a larger context of many other brilliant people working to achieve the same goals. Previous FH inventions had been limited in scope and practicality; the Lamarr-Antheil device may have been similarly limited. The Sonobuoy application proves that it may have been workable, and more effort should be spent tracking down proof of any further relevance to future inventions in SSFH.
I’m also convinced that we should have documentaries and books about R. I. Ścibor-Marchocki.
I’d like to reiterate my thanks to David Rand Irvin and his corrections.
COMING SOON
Let’s say that you, like Richard Rhodes, are a writer/journalist. You’ve latched onto a striking theory about a secret female genius: a theory that’s explosive, thrilling; it would reassign a huge corpus of “male” accomplishment onto a single, hidden woman. It’s 2018. In academia and media and real life, paradigms of gender seem to be fissuring everywhere. The timing for your theory couldn’t be more perfect.
But let’s say that you — unlike Richard Rhodes — have latched onto topic whose sources are not obscure, and whose subject — unlike spread spectrum frequency hopping — is widely studied. So widely studied, in fact, that there are multiple museums, archives, and scholarly journals dedicated to this central male figure. Almost all primary sources about his life are digitized and publicly available. The professors who devote their lives to the study this figure and his period number in the thousands. It’s a scholarly arena in which even experts will be swiftly corrected and refuted by their peers. And outside academia, there exist vast numbers of armchair experts and amateur researchers well-versed in the period. What can you do, as a maverick crusader with a tidal wave of evidence opposing you?
If you’re Elizabeth Winkler, your solution is to lower the lance and charge even more intently toward the windmill. You will argue that Shakespeare may have been written by a secret woman/others, and that “Stratfordians” are idolatrous hacks afraid of your heretical questions. You will reframe criticisms of your work as systemic wrongs, all while using your media credentials and connections to bring the publishing world to heel. You will publish Shakespeare Was a Woman (2023). It’s coming out in paperback on Shakespeare’s birthday this week; I guess I’ll have to review it.
There are multiple theories as to why the Navy did not develop the concept. George Antheil claims that they were dismissive of him and Lamarr as outsiders, and misunderstood the “piano roll” connection to mean that the Communications System would be too physically large. Richard Rhodes posits that the Navy was having so many issues with torpedoes that adding another engineering challenge would have been unmanageable. Another theory is that something similar was already being developed in other programs.
One small pet theory of mine is that the Inventor Council’s/Lamarr PR team’s (?) over-the-top announcement of the Lamarr’s invention to the press in 1941 might have further given the Navy cold feet.
HF, 146.
HF, 168-9.
HF, 147. See also: “Hedy’s original idea” (147, 155,), “Hedy had the idea of frequency hopping” (152), “None of these earlier developments constitute a complete frequency-hopping system such as Hedy and George’s”(198 — this is a bit more accurate, since the piano thing was new), “what…is clear is that none of that [other] work preceded Hedy and George’s invention” (197).
HF, 194.
For example, Rhodes claims that “the Navy acquired the patent [after 1942, and] kept the technology secret,” (HF 187-188) despite evidence from Antheil, Lamarr’s lawyers, and the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook that show that the patent was never classified at all.
HF, 246.
Scholtz, “Origins,” 829.
The team of Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam developed numerous advances in cryptography and telecommunications. Knowledge of Vernam’s namesake cipher allowed the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to crack high-level German ciphers during WW2.
I believe Ścibor-Marchocki may have passed on — I came across a dead link that looked like an in memorium — so unfortunately his insights into 50s technological breakthroughs will likely be lost.
I also don’t think that Ścibor-Marchocki, in his really gracious move to give Lamarr credit, gave himself enough credit for the staggering systems and codes to which he contributed.
He wrote the operating principles for the IBM-650, the world’s first mass-produced computer (1953).
The novelette, called “Pod in the Barrier” (Galaxy, Sep 1957) involves the Luanae, an ancient alien race that has deployed various forms of highly-advanced frequency technology. This ranges from the jam-proof missiles to psychic beacons. They communicate via “transmissions which covered the entire spectra of intelligence, transcending language, surpassing even symbolism.”
“Pod” is also one of the most horrifyingly frank and realistic depictions of sexism I’ve read in sci-fi. The crew consists of several men and just one woman, a selected for her homeliness and inability to tempt the men on their voyage. The aptly-named Virginia inspires profound hatred from the crewmen simply by existing (“you couldn’t stand what the others might think of you if you went near her”) and their treatment of her only gets worse from there.
The note across the page about Broertjes is likely from one of Lamarr’s lawyers, thinking of a potential objection to the denial of that part of the patent.
George Antheil mentions this in his autobiography. Additionally, the patent is cited as a precedent in a few patents in the 50s and 60s, further proof that it was publicly available.
Interestingly, there’s a huge gap in any patents citing Lamarr-Antheil that spans from 1961 to the 1990s, when the campaign to credit her took off.
To see the patent references, go to Patent Public Search and type in “2292387.”
This is from Bombshell; I’d screenshot it but Netflix won’t let me
There’s an interview her daughter does that’s used in Bombshell:
Juliet Gilden: Did she talk about the inventions not being acknowledged throughout her life? Did she carry a lot of angst about that?
Denise Loder-DeLuca: No. I barely even knew that it existed. She had mentioned to me she invented some anti-rocket missile device… We literally didn’t even talk about it.
Loder-DeLuca goes on to say that they never discussed it until people started contacting them and sending them articles.
Another interview used in the film goes like this:
Interviewer: Have you ever tried to get some recompense for your idea — your patent?
Lamarr: No. [But] I’m surprised they don’t even acknowledge it.
Lamarr bios and online materials also insinuate that she invented the modern traffic light and the yellow light warning, also known as a change interval. (One site, STEMettes, flat-out asserts that “In the past, traffic lights didn’t have an amber light. They just had a red and green light… Hedy was able to develop a safer system.”) Per Tommy Wiseau, this is bullshit; the standard tricolor traffic light we use now was invented by a traffic officer named William Potts in 1920, before Lamarr even arrived in America. Garrett Morgan of Cleveland invented an automatic, electric traffic light in 1923. Although now I’m questioning every internet piece of information I see about any invention ever produced.
Hi, Maya -- I enjoyed reading your article about Hedy Lamarr and FHSS, despite the unkind comments that you directed toward me personally. You have unquestionable talent as a writer.
I have a question, and an offer.
The question is: you mention that Hedy patented several other inventions. Since I am interested in her work, and would like to see these patents, can you provide the patent numbers or any other identifiers that would lead me to them? I have not been successful in finding them on my own.
The proposition is: your article contains quite a number of errors. If you would like, we could discuss this further, perhaps by telephone.
Another mystery that surrounds Hedy is the repeated claim that she was a "brilliant mathematician." To me, this seems quite unlikely, as she dropped-out of school at age 16 or so. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that she contributed even a single original thought to the field of mathematics. Do you know of any such evidence?
By the way, that link that you provide calls up a version of my paper from a pre-print server. Authors use pre-print servers to try to draw review comments before they publish more formally. My paper went from that stage, on to peer review by three very capable experts, and was later published in the proceedings of a small, but historically important organization whose membership is sufficiently well educated to understand what I was saying. I never intended for this work to have an audience among the general public. I would also note that Dr. Rothman's paper was published in Sigma Xi's "American Scientist" magazine. As you may know, Sigma Xi is the scientific world's counterpart to Phi Beta Kappa, and "American Scientist" is the counterpart of Phi Beta Kappa's "American Scholar. " It may help to mention also that Dr. Rothman was, at one time, editor of "Scientific American."
Thanks again for mentioning my work, and best wishes!
David Rand Irvin
Really appreciate the deep dive on this. It always bugs me when that “I invented wi-fi” meme with Hedy’s face on it makes the rounds on social media. Giving false credit takes away from her very real achievements. Can’t wait for your next piece!