April 11, 2024 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Hedy Lamarr set a high standard for more than screen performance. She negotiated for fair contract terms - and in her spare time, applied her mind to solve a torpedo guidance problem for the U.S. Navy in wartime.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot Com. There's some of our favorites.
And today we have Faith bringing us the story of
Hettie Lamar. Take it away, Faith.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Famous Hollywood actress Hetty Lamar was born in Austria in
nineteen fourteen. By the mid nineteen forties, she became the
world's first superstar in Hollywood. She was known for her
striking beauty and her at times scandalous movie appearances. Pulitzer
Prize winner Richard Rhodes wrote a book titled Hetty's Folly,
(00:58):
The Life and breakthrough Invention of Hattie Lamar, The Most
Beautiful Woman in the World. This book helps unpack the
life of a woman that perhaps we thought we knew.
Here is Richard Rhodes.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
When she walked into a room, she actually stopped conversations.
People would be startled by her appearance. The sad tragedy
of her life, in a way, though, was that she
was also highly intelligent, and since she was so strikingly beautiful,
(01:37):
hardly anyone ever noticed her intelligence. It wasn't factored into
the kind of roles she was given in movies, where
she usually played some conventionally beautiful woman falling in and
out of love with a handsome leading man. I mean,
(01:57):
the tragedy of this woman was that she, as she
pointed out, more than a pretty face. She liked to
say sarcastically, I can tell you how to be clamorous.
All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
(02:18):
Growing up in Vienna, her parents were wealthy. Her father
was a Jewish banker and an athlete. Her mother had
trained as a concert pianist, and she grew up in
what was a really multicultural and multi religious community in
(02:39):
Vienna just around the time and after the time of
the First World War, so a very cultured world. Vienna
was just one of the centers of culture in those days,
and particularly a theater, and she fell in love with theater.
She was a good actress, She was smart, and he
(03:00):
learned to play roles, and much more than the roles
she later would play in American films ever tested her for.
She also became kind of the catch of the day
in Austria exactly because of her beauty on the one
end and her fame on the other, and the second
richest man in Austria decided he wanted her for his
(03:23):
arm piece and courted her. His name was Fritz Mendel.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
This relationship was doomed from the start. He had pursued
her for her beauty, and because of that he also
was terribly jealous and insecure, making him quite a horrible husband.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
I mean, he had maids picking up the extension whenever
she was talking with friends on the phone, and had
her followed and so forth. He was quite certain that
she was cheating on him, which as far as I understand,
she was not so. On the one hand, it was
a glamorous life with castles and beautiful apartments in Vienna.
(04:04):
But on the other hand, she said one time she
felt as if she was in a golden cage because
she really was locked away.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It was now nineteen thirty four and pretty soon the
Nazis would take over Austria. Het, do you wanted to
get out of Austria to pursue her dream of becoming
a famous Hollywood actress. Of course, her jealous husband thought
it was in bad taste for her to be an actress,
so she decided to leave him.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
The truth is, as I found when I researched the
newspapers in New York and in Vienna, that it was
quite a public divorce, as one might imagine. So off
she went first to Paris and then to London, and
she had her jewelry to pond to put together a
(04:54):
kind of nest egg. It happened at that particular point
in time that a Metro Golden Louis B. Mayer, the director,
was in London and traveling around Europe buying up the
contracts of Jewish artists who understood that it was time
to get out of Europe ahead of the Nazi attack
(05:18):
on the Jews. He was able to sign get people
to sign contracts with fairly low wages with his studio
for up to eight years at a time, so he
really was kind of buying job lots of European actors.
Hetty wasn't going to be conned into letting that happen
to her, so when he made an offer to her
(05:39):
after she met him in London, she basically said, no,
that's not nearly sufficient and walked out. That intrigued him,
and then she found out what ship he was sailing
back to the United States on booked passage on the
same ship, made sure he saw her playing deck tennis
with handsome young men on the ship. And by the
(06:00):
time they arrived in New York, she had a contract
for a pretty good weekly salary for only three years
and commitment to make a certain number of films. So
she was launched.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
She had charmed the director of MGM into hiring her
for the price that she wanted. There's no doubt that
while her beauty at times was a burden, at other
times she used it as a tool to get what
she needed. She got to the States and soon started
her new career as an actress.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
And you've been listening to Richard Rhodes and he's the
author of Hetty's Folly, The Life and breakthrough Inventions of
Hetty Lamar, the most beautiful woman in the world. And
what a story we're hearing so far. In my goodness,
we learned right away what a tough negotiator Hetty Lamar
is not eight years, no, down to three years. She
(06:57):
widows Louis b. Meyer and from or money too. When
we come back, this remarkable life, this remarkable American life,
Hetty Lamar's life continues here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:30):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:52):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue with our American Stories.
And we've been listening to the story of a famous
(08:14):
actress from the nineteen forties, Patty Lamar. She had just
derived from Europe and was beginning her acting career in
the States. Her first film with MGM was with French
American actor Charles Boyer. We pick up with author Richard
Rhodes describing Hetty's breakout into Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
There's a moment in the film, and it was really
Hetty's debut in Hollywood, where she steps out of a
doorway into a lovely kind of sunlight and she burst
on the world as this extraordinarily beautiful woman and really
became a star of Verneid as a result. So from
(08:59):
there she made Maid a few more films with Metro
Golden Mayor. She, like so many people who emigrated to
the United States out of that terrible world of pre
World War II Europe, was immensely grateful to the country
for taking her in, and she became a citizen around
(09:20):
I think nineteen forty two or forty three, after she
had spent the requisite time living in the United States.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Well, she loved her new home, the United States and
was grateful to be where she was. Her heart still
went out to those in Europe. During the Great Blitz
of London, when the Germans began bombing London relentlessly, the
English moved their children out of London to the countryside,
or in large numbers, they were shipped to Canada. This
was the first time in history that countries were bombing
(09:50):
cities and civilian areas in attempts to save them, the
British sent their children away.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Hetty one day, reading following this in the news papers,
was horrified to read that a shipload of children one
of the liners that was being used to transport them,
had been torpedoed by a German submarine and had sunk
with I think eighty two children were killed in that
particular assault. By then, she had done something really quite
(10:23):
unusual for Hollywood. She didn't drink, she didn't like to
go to laud parties. But in order to fill her
time between movies, she had to find something, some other
way to occupy herself, and she took up inventing. She
invented some new kind of stoplight. She invented a chair
(10:44):
on a pivot that could be swung into a shower
so that someone who couldn't stand up in the shower
could take a shower and then swing back out in
the chair and drive themselves off. So she was kind
of a classic inventor in that she had no technical
training particularly, but she had a way of looking at
(11:04):
the world that asked, how can you fix this problem,
this large or small problem that exists. So when she
read about the German submarines torpedoing all these English ships
with particularly the ones with children on them, and realized
that this was Austria and Germany was where she came from,
(11:27):
and that it was horrible that her background should somehow
be tied in with this terrible business of killing civilians.
She decided she would figure out a way to make
it more possible than it was at the time to
attack and destroy a submarine. Unfortunately, the torpedoes of the
(11:50):
day didn't have any real guidance systems on them. You
would kind of move as close as you could and
aim the torpedo and the direction of the submarine, or
rather where the submarine would be when you thought the
torpedo would meet the submarine, and then you'd launch, And
almost all of the torpedoes missed their targets. So she thought, well,
(12:14):
there must be a way to guide a torpedo, and
the way she thought of was using radio. A plane
or a surface ship with a radio transmitter could transmit
a signal to a torpedo that was probably let's say,
towing an wire antenna behind it on the surface to
(12:35):
pick up the signal, and the signal could direct the
rudder on the torpedo left or right and guide the
torpedo in real time to the submarine and blow up
the submarine and therefore prevent the children from being kipt.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, the United States had not yet entered the war,
there was an organization set up where invendors could send
their wartime invention ideas to the government.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
There were something like three hundred thousand submissions in the
course of the Second World War. Unfortunately, almost none of
which ever got developed into a workable instrument. That's where
Hetty turned to find support for her idea of a
radio controlled torpedo. Now she also had found a collaborator.
(13:26):
This was another colorful figure from the tens and twenties
of the century named George Antil, an American composer of
avant garde music and a concert pianist. They met at
a dinner party with some friends and immediately bonded over
the fact that they were both very interested in the
(13:47):
European War. Hetty broached the idea of her torpedo. Anti
was immediately interested. The question became, what kind of radio
control system could you use? There were no no no
digital chips in those days. What would actually tell the
(14:07):
torpedo how to direct itself. Antile's music had featured a
number of compositions, some of them quite notorious, using player pianos,
and the player piano is operated by a scroll of
paper with holes in it that rolls past a vacuum
(14:28):
pipe and where there's a whole air is sucked in,
and that triggers the mechanism that makes a key activate
on the piano. So Antile imagined that you could probably
make a miniature version of one of these scrolls. You
could make them out of something more durable than paper, obviously,
(14:49):
and that that device with its impact. He actually gave
the scroll that they used in their Model eighty eight
holes rather like the keys on a piano. So they
then Hetty's original idea for a radio controlled torpedo. They
wanted one, however, that couldn't be jammed by a radio signal,
(15:10):
because if somebody was on the enemy side with picking
up radio signals and they heard the signal being transmitted
from the ship to the torpedo, they could, by producing
a sound on the same frequency, basically jammed the signal.
So how do you solve that problem? Well there Heeadi
(15:30):
got her idea from one of the world's first remote
control boxes that had ever been used. She bought a
very expensive radio, and radios in those days were the
sizes of refrigerators. She bought a remote control for her
living room radio that had was basically like the dial
(15:53):
on an old dial phone, but it was a remote
control and she thought, well, something like that would work.
That's where the notion of having multiple frequencies with the
signal jumping from frequency to frequency in a more or
less random pattern, would allow the transmitter to send a
(16:16):
signal to the receiver in the torpedo that would jump
around all over eighty eight different frequencies, and that no
one could follow fast enough with a jamming signal, so
the signal could go through. It couldn't be jamned. Here
was a really great idea. They put it all together
with the help of a physicist specialist in electronics who
(16:42):
was loaned to them by the National Inventors Council, the
organization I mentioned that was there to make these inventions
possibly useful to the government. So obviously the National Inventors
Council thought this was a worthy project, and indeed it was.
It probably would have worked very well. But when they
(17:02):
took it to the Navy, the obvious place to take it.
Once you had worked out the basic ideas, that had
a blueprint for an invention, which, by the way, she
and George antile Hetty and George then patented. It was
patented under Hetty's maiden name, which at that time was Marquis.
So the patent was assigned to Hedwig Marquis and George
(17:26):
Antile under that name. It was given to them as
a protection for their invention. They then donated this patent
to the US Navy.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And you've been listening to Richard Rhodes, the author of
the definitive biography of Hetty Lamar. When we come back
more of this remarkable story, Hetty Lamar's story here on
our American story, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:10):
and we're about to hear the final part of famous
Hollywood actress Eddie Lamar's story. We learned that Hetty was
not only beautiful, but she was brilliant as well. Her
and her composer friend George Antel had created this frequency
hopping spread spectrum technology and then handed it over to
(18:31):
the Navy. We returned to Faith with the rest of
the story.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
After passing it off to the Navy, the Navy stamped
at top secret and they didn't hear about it for
a long time. Hetty went on to live her life.
She had two children and ended up getting married a
total of six times. The longest marriage lasting about seven years.
After a little over a decade, in the early nineteen fifties,
(19:00):
the idea for the radio control torpedo was resurrected. The
technology would soon prove itself to be incredibly useful.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
When someone pulled it off the shelf and tossed it
over to one of the many small engineering firms that
the military keeps and maintains to develop ideas, and the
engineer who looked it over thought, wow, this is an
interesting idea, not for torpedoes, but for ship to ship
(19:31):
communications because it was something that couldn't be jammed. So
the first application of the Marquee entile invention came in
the early nineteen fifties in the form of a communications
system between a plane and what's called a sun of boy.
(19:53):
A boy, of course, is an object that's floating in
the ocean. This particular boy had a sonar system on
its underside underwater that would project sonar signals down through
the water to listen for submarines. The inventor, who spoke
of it later as a very successful invention, said, this
(20:16):
was a perfect way too, to make sure we had
a signal that was secure between the plane that would
fly over and pick up the communications from the saunoboy
and from the Saunoboy itself. But pretty quickly the Navy
realized what an efficient way this was to talk from
ship to ship, and the ships, for example, that were
(20:39):
sent down to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in
nineteen sixty two were all fitted with radio systems that
used the patent that had been developed by Hetty Lamar
and George Entile. After that it spread through the military,
it became a pretty standard communication systems. In the nineteen seventies,
(21:04):
a lot of these World War II and that era
military secret inventions were declassified under Jimmy Carter as a
way of boosting commercial development of these things, and this
invention was picked up and used in some of the
early car telephones, which of course preceded the kind of
(21:29):
cell phones we have now, but had a similar problem
that was not privacy so much as the fact that
if you had one car telephone talking to another car
telephone on one frequency within a particular given city, there
would only be about a hundred frequencies that you could use.
(21:52):
That would mean that no more than a couple hundred
cars could be talking to each other at the same time,
and that obviously was not a commercially viable proposition. But
if you could use this jumping frequency hopping as Eddy
called it, which came to be called spread spectrum when
they changed it slightly, but it was basically the same
(22:13):
idea that you move a signal around among different frequencies.
With that thousands of cars could talk to each other
at the same time and no one would really hear
more than an occasional maybe almost inaudible blip if two
of the signals crossed each other and blotted each other out.
Then later on it was used as the basis for
(22:36):
what we call bluetooth today and still is used in Bluetooth.
It didn't become the basis for all of our cell phones,
primarily because it was slightly more expensive to manufacture the
system than it is for the one that she used
in cell phones in the United States, so the manufacturers
decided they'd rather go with something that wasn't quite as
(22:56):
good actually, but that didn't cost them quite so much.
To me, there are i think cell phone systems elsewhere
in the world, however, the do use the spread spectrum
frequency hopping system. So what started out as a launable
interest in trying to save the lives of English children.
(23:18):
Became then a patent that no one saw any use
for for about ten years, and then it became a
superb communications system for the Navy, then it spread through
the military, then it was used. I think the GPS
system that we all operate on these days is another
example of the Heady Lamar George entile spread spectrum system
(23:41):
that communicates back and forth between the satellites overhead and
all of our ground systems, and then eventually Bluetooth, which
of course is just universal for short distance communication with
all sorts of smart smart equipment that we have around
us today. The one piece left in the story is
(24:02):
Hetty's lingering feeling as she got older that she had
never been given proper credit for this invention. You know,
she didn't want the money she had given the patent
to the Navy, but she kind of felt that the
very least that the nation could do for this gift
she had given it was to thank her in some way.
(24:25):
But of course it had all been lost in the
fact that her name on the patent wasn't Eddie Lamar,
It was head Big Marquee.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
A man in Colorado who is working on digital communications,
stumbled upon the Marquie Antil patent and wondered who these
people were and why their patent for this frequency hopping
spread spectrum technology was just sitting there.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Started looking into it and discovered, to his delight that
the head big Markey was Heeddie Lamar. He had, like
so many men of his age, had been absolutely had
a crush when he was a teenager during the Second
World War, and the idea that she might have not
ever received credit for this really bothered him. All of
(25:11):
this culminated in the inventors kind of getting together and
agreeing that she should receive an award, and she did
in the early nineteen nineties. It was the Pioneer Freedom
Foundation in San Francisco, which is devoted to recognizing the
(25:33):
work of early digital pioneers. She obviously fit that category.
She by then had had so many plastic surgeries that
she really had runned her face, and she no longer
went out in public. But she had a son who did,
and who came to San Francisco and received the award
(25:54):
for her. She had made a tape for him which
he played to the to the conference. In it, she
said basically thank you. I appreciate finally being recognized. But
she had said to her son when he called her
before this event and told her what was coming up,
she had said an inimicable Hollywood style, well it's about time.
(26:22):
Then her last dream in life. This was a person
who really did accomplish the things she wanted to accomplish.
That her last goal in life was to live to
the turn of the century, which she did. She died
in January of the year two thousand in her little
house in Florida. Her children. Happy woman and now I
(26:44):
think she was never happy in love, but she did
some extraordinary things in her life.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
And great job on that faith and what a story.
In my goodness, it wasn't the money she ever wanted,
but getting that wreck cognition by the Pioneer Freedom Foundation
in San Francisco a big deal to her. Hetty Lamar's
story here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot Com. There's some of our favorites.
And today we have Faith bringing us the story of
Hettie Lamar. Take it away, Faith.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Famous Hollywood actress Hetty Lamar was born in Austria in
nineteen fourteen. By the mid nineteen forties, she became the
world's first superstar in Hollywood. She was known for her
striking beauty and her at times scandalous movie appearances. Pulitzer
Prize winner Richard Rhodes wrote a book titled Hetty's Folly,
(00:58):
The Life and breakthrough Invention of Hattie Lamar, The Most
Beautiful Woman in the World. This book helps unpack the
life of a woman that perhaps we thought we knew.
Here is Richard Rhodes.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
When she walked into a room, she actually stopped conversations.
People would be startled by her appearance. The sad tragedy
of her life, in a way, though, was that she
was also highly intelligent, and since she was so strikingly beautiful,
(01:37):
hardly anyone ever noticed her intelligence. It wasn't factored into
the kind of roles she was given in movies, where
she usually played some conventionally beautiful woman falling in and
out of love with a handsome leading man. I mean,
(01:57):
the tragedy of this woman was that she, as she
pointed out, more than a pretty face. She liked to
say sarcastically, I can tell you how to be clamorous.
All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
(02:18):
Growing up in Vienna, her parents were wealthy. Her father
was a Jewish banker and an athlete. Her mother had
trained as a concert pianist, and she grew up in
what was a really multicultural and multi religious community in
(02:39):
Vienna just around the time and after the time of
the First World War, so a very cultured world. Vienna
was just one of the centers of culture in those days,
and particularly a theater, and she fell in love with theater.
She was a good actress, She was smart, and he
(03:00):
learned to play roles, and much more than the roles
she later would play in American films ever tested her for.
She also became kind of the catch of the day
in Austria exactly because of her beauty on the one
end and her fame on the other, and the second
richest man in Austria decided he wanted her for his
(03:23):
arm piece and courted her. His name was Fritz Mendel.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
This relationship was doomed from the start. He had pursued
her for her beauty, and because of that he also
was terribly jealous and insecure, making him quite a horrible husband.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
I mean, he had maids picking up the extension whenever
she was talking with friends on the phone, and had
her followed and so forth. He was quite certain that
she was cheating on him, which as far as I understand,
she was not so. On the one hand, it was
a glamorous life with castles and beautiful apartments in Vienna.
(04:04):
But on the other hand, she said one time she
felt as if she was in a golden cage because
she really was locked away.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It was now nineteen thirty four and pretty soon the
Nazis would take over Austria. Het, do you wanted to
get out of Austria to pursue her dream of becoming
a famous Hollywood actress. Of course, her jealous husband thought
it was in bad taste for her to be an actress,
so she decided to leave him.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
The truth is, as I found when I researched the
newspapers in New York and in Vienna, that it was
quite a public divorce, as one might imagine. So off
she went first to Paris and then to London, and
she had her jewelry to pond to put together a
(04:54):
kind of nest egg. It happened at that particular point
in time that a Metro Golden Louis B. Mayer, the director,
was in London and traveling around Europe buying up the
contracts of Jewish artists who understood that it was time
to get out of Europe ahead of the Nazi attack
(05:18):
on the Jews. He was able to sign get people
to sign contracts with fairly low wages with his studio
for up to eight years at a time, so he
really was kind of buying job lots of European actors.
Hetty wasn't going to be conned into letting that happen
to her, so when he made an offer to her
(05:39):
after she met him in London, she basically said, no,
that's not nearly sufficient and walked out. That intrigued him,
and then she found out what ship he was sailing
back to the United States on booked passage on the
same ship, made sure he saw her playing deck tennis
with handsome young men on the ship. And by the
(06:00):
time they arrived in New York, she had a contract
for a pretty good weekly salary for only three years
and commitment to make a certain number of films. So
she was launched.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
She had charmed the director of MGM into hiring her
for the price that she wanted. There's no doubt that
while her beauty at times was a burden, at other
times she used it as a tool to get what
she needed. She got to the States and soon started
her new career as an actress.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
And you've been listening to Richard Rhodes and he's the
author of Hetty's Folly, The Life and breakthrough Inventions of
Hetty Lamar, the most beautiful woman in the world. And
what a story we're hearing so far. In my goodness,
we learned right away what a tough negotiator Hetty Lamar
is not eight years, no, down to three years. She
(06:57):
widows Louis b. Meyer and from or money too. When
we come back, this remarkable life, this remarkable American life,
Hetty Lamar's life continues here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:30):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:52):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue with our American Stories.
And we've been listening to the story of a famous
(08:14):
actress from the nineteen forties, Patty Lamar. She had just
derived from Europe and was beginning her acting career in
the States. Her first film with MGM was with French
American actor Charles Boyer. We pick up with author Richard
Rhodes describing Hetty's breakout into Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
There's a moment in the film, and it was really
Hetty's debut in Hollywood, where she steps out of a
doorway into a lovely kind of sunlight and she burst
on the world as this extraordinarily beautiful woman and really
became a star of Verneid as a result. So from
(08:59):
there she made Maid a few more films with Metro
Golden Mayor. She, like so many people who emigrated to
the United States out of that terrible world of pre
World War II Europe, was immensely grateful to the country
for taking her in, and she became a citizen around
(09:20):
I think nineteen forty two or forty three, after she
had spent the requisite time living in the United States.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Well, she loved her new home, the United States and
was grateful to be where she was. Her heart still
went out to those in Europe. During the Great Blitz
of London, when the Germans began bombing London relentlessly, the
English moved their children out of London to the countryside,
or in large numbers, they were shipped to Canada. This
was the first time in history that countries were bombing
(09:50):
cities and civilian areas in attempts to save them, the
British sent their children away.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Hetty one day, reading following this in the news papers,
was horrified to read that a shipload of children one
of the liners that was being used to transport them,
had been torpedoed by a German submarine and had sunk
with I think eighty two children were killed in that
particular assault. By then, she had done something really quite
(10:23):
unusual for Hollywood. She didn't drink, she didn't like to
go to laud parties. But in order to fill her
time between movies, she had to find something, some other
way to occupy herself, and she took up inventing. She
invented some new kind of stoplight. She invented a chair
(10:44):
on a pivot that could be swung into a shower
so that someone who couldn't stand up in the shower
could take a shower and then swing back out in
the chair and drive themselves off. So she was kind
of a classic inventor in that she had no technical
training particularly, but she had a way of looking at
(11:04):
the world that asked, how can you fix this problem,
this large or small problem that exists. So when she
read about the German submarines torpedoing all these English ships
with particularly the ones with children on them, and realized
that this was Austria and Germany was where she came from,
(11:27):
and that it was horrible that her background should somehow
be tied in with this terrible business of killing civilians.
She decided she would figure out a way to make
it more possible than it was at the time to
attack and destroy a submarine. Unfortunately, the torpedoes of the
(11:50):
day didn't have any real guidance systems on them. You
would kind of move as close as you could and
aim the torpedo and the direction of the submarine, or
rather where the submarine would be when you thought the
torpedo would meet the submarine, and then you'd launch, And
almost all of the torpedoes missed their targets. So she thought, well,
(12:14):
there must be a way to guide a torpedo, and
the way she thought of was using radio. A plane
or a surface ship with a radio transmitter could transmit
a signal to a torpedo that was probably let's say,
towing an wire antenna behind it on the surface to
(12:35):
pick up the signal, and the signal could direct the
rudder on the torpedo left or right and guide the
torpedo in real time to the submarine and blow up
the submarine and therefore prevent the children from being kipt.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, the United States had not yet entered the war,
there was an organization set up where invendors could send
their wartime invention ideas to the government.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
There were something like three hundred thousand submissions in the
course of the Second World War. Unfortunately, almost none of
which ever got developed into a workable instrument. That's where
Hetty turned to find support for her idea of a
radio controlled torpedo. Now she also had found a collaborator.
(13:26):
This was another colorful figure from the tens and twenties
of the century named George Antil, an American composer of
avant garde music and a concert pianist. They met at
a dinner party with some friends and immediately bonded over
the fact that they were both very interested in the
(13:47):
European War. Hetty broached the idea of her torpedo. Anti
was immediately interested. The question became, what kind of radio
control system could you use? There were no no no
digital chips in those days. What would actually tell the
(14:07):
torpedo how to direct itself. Antile's music had featured a
number of compositions, some of them quite notorious, using player pianos,
and the player piano is operated by a scroll of
paper with holes in it that rolls past a vacuum
(14:28):
pipe and where there's a whole air is sucked in,
and that triggers the mechanism that makes a key activate
on the piano. So Antile imagined that you could probably
make a miniature version of one of these scrolls. You
could make them out of something more durable than paper, obviously,
(14:49):
and that that device with its impact. He actually gave
the scroll that they used in their Model eighty eight
holes rather like the keys on a piano. So they
then Hetty's original idea for a radio controlled torpedo. They
wanted one, however, that couldn't be jammed by a radio signal,
(15:10):
because if somebody was on the enemy side with picking
up radio signals and they heard the signal being transmitted
from the ship to the torpedo, they could, by producing
a sound on the same frequency, basically jammed the signal.
So how do you solve that problem? Well there Heeadi
(15:30):
got her idea from one of the world's first remote
control boxes that had ever been used. She bought a
very expensive radio, and radios in those days were the
sizes of refrigerators. She bought a remote control for her
living room radio that had was basically like the dial
(15:53):
on an old dial phone, but it was a remote
control and she thought, well, something like that would work.
That's where the notion of having multiple frequencies with the
signal jumping from frequency to frequency in a more or
less random pattern, would allow the transmitter to send a
(16:16):
signal to the receiver in the torpedo that would jump
around all over eighty eight different frequencies, and that no
one could follow fast enough with a jamming signal, so
the signal could go through. It couldn't be jamned. Here
was a really great idea. They put it all together
with the help of a physicist specialist in electronics who
(16:42):
was loaned to them by the National Inventors Council, the
organization I mentioned that was there to make these inventions
possibly useful to the government. So obviously the National Inventors
Council thought this was a worthy project, and indeed it was.
It probably would have worked very well. But when they
(17:02):
took it to the Navy, the obvious place to take it.
Once you had worked out the basic ideas, that had
a blueprint for an invention, which, by the way, she
and George antile Hetty and George then patented. It was
patented under Hetty's maiden name, which at that time was Marquis.
So the patent was assigned to Hedwig Marquis and George
(17:26):
Antile under that name. It was given to them as
a protection for their invention. They then donated this patent
to the US Navy.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And you've been listening to Richard Rhodes, the author of
the definitive biography of Hetty Lamar. When we come back
more of this remarkable story, Hetty Lamar's story here on
our American story, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:10):
and we're about to hear the final part of famous
Hollywood actress Eddie Lamar's story. We learned that Hetty was
not only beautiful, but she was brilliant as well. Her
and her composer friend George Antel had created this frequency
hopping spread spectrum technology and then handed it over to
(18:31):
the Navy. We returned to Faith with the rest of
the story.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
After passing it off to the Navy, the Navy stamped
at top secret and they didn't hear about it for
a long time. Hetty went on to live her life.
She had two children and ended up getting married a
total of six times. The longest marriage lasting about seven years.
After a little over a decade, in the early nineteen fifties,
(19:00):
the idea for the radio control torpedo was resurrected. The
technology would soon prove itself to be incredibly useful.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
When someone pulled it off the shelf and tossed it
over to one of the many small engineering firms that
the military keeps and maintains to develop ideas, and the
engineer who looked it over thought, wow, this is an
interesting idea, not for torpedoes, but for ship to ship
(19:31):
communications because it was something that couldn't be jammed. So
the first application of the Marquee entile invention came in
the early nineteen fifties in the form of a communications
system between a plane and what's called a sun of boy.
(19:53):
A boy, of course, is an object that's floating in
the ocean. This particular boy had a sonar system on
its underside underwater that would project sonar signals down through
the water to listen for submarines. The inventor, who spoke
of it later as a very successful invention, said, this
(20:16):
was a perfect way too, to make sure we had
a signal that was secure between the plane that would
fly over and pick up the communications from the saunoboy
and from the Saunoboy itself. But pretty quickly the Navy
realized what an efficient way this was to talk from
ship to ship, and the ships, for example, that were
(20:39):
sent down to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in
nineteen sixty two were all fitted with radio systems that
used the patent that had been developed by Hetty Lamar
and George Entile. After that it spread through the military,
it became a pretty standard communication systems. In the nineteen seventies,
(21:04):
a lot of these World War II and that era
military secret inventions were declassified under Jimmy Carter as a
way of boosting commercial development of these things, and this
invention was picked up and used in some of the
early car telephones, which of course preceded the kind of
(21:29):
cell phones we have now, but had a similar problem
that was not privacy so much as the fact that
if you had one car telephone talking to another car
telephone on one frequency within a particular given city, there
would only be about a hundred frequencies that you could use.
(21:52):
That would mean that no more than a couple hundred
cars could be talking to each other at the same time,
and that obviously was not a commercially viable proposition. But
if you could use this jumping frequency hopping as Eddy
called it, which came to be called spread spectrum when
they changed it slightly, but it was basically the same
(22:13):
idea that you move a signal around among different frequencies.
With that thousands of cars could talk to each other
at the same time and no one would really hear
more than an occasional maybe almost inaudible blip if two
of the signals crossed each other and blotted each other out.
Then later on it was used as the basis for
(22:36):
what we call bluetooth today and still is used in Bluetooth.
It didn't become the basis for all of our cell phones,
primarily because it was slightly more expensive to manufacture the
system than it is for the one that she used
in cell phones in the United States, so the manufacturers
decided they'd rather go with something that wasn't quite as
(22:56):
good actually, but that didn't cost them quite so much.
To me, there are i think cell phone systems elsewhere
in the world, however, the do use the spread spectrum
frequency hopping system. So what started out as a launable
interest in trying to save the lives of English children.
(23:18):
Became then a patent that no one saw any use
for for about ten years, and then it became a
superb communications system for the Navy, then it spread through
the military, then it was used. I think the GPS
system that we all operate on these days is another
example of the Heady Lamar George entile spread spectrum system
(23:41):
that communicates back and forth between the satellites overhead and
all of our ground systems, and then eventually Bluetooth, which
of course is just universal for short distance communication with
all sorts of smart smart equipment that we have around
us today. The one piece left in the story is
(24:02):
Hetty's lingering feeling as she got older that she had
never been given proper credit for this invention. You know,
she didn't want the money she had given the patent
to the Navy, but she kind of felt that the
very least that the nation could do for this gift
she had given it was to thank her in some way.
(24:25):
But of course it had all been lost in the
fact that her name on the patent wasn't Eddie Lamar,
It was head Big Marquee.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
A man in Colorado who is working on digital communications,
stumbled upon the Marquie Antil patent and wondered who these
people were and why their patent for this frequency hopping
spread spectrum technology was just sitting there.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Started looking into it and discovered, to his delight that
the head big Markey was Heeddie Lamar. He had, like
so many men of his age, had been absolutely had
a crush when he was a teenager during the Second
World War, and the idea that she might have not
ever received credit for this really bothered him. All of
(25:11):
this culminated in the inventors kind of getting together and
agreeing that she should receive an award, and she did
in the early nineteen nineties. It was the Pioneer Freedom
Foundation in San Francisco, which is devoted to recognizing the
(25:33):
work of early digital pioneers. She obviously fit that category.
She by then had had so many plastic surgeries that
she really had runned her face, and she no longer
went out in public. But she had a son who did,
and who came to San Francisco and received the award
(25:54):
for her. She had made a tape for him which
he played to the to the conference. In it, she
said basically thank you. I appreciate finally being recognized. But
she had said to her son when he called her
before this event and told her what was coming up,
she had said an inimicable Hollywood style, well it's about time.
(26:22):
Then her last dream in life. This was a person
who really did accomplish the things she wanted to accomplish.
That her last goal in life was to live to
the turn of the century, which she did. She died
in January of the year two thousand in her little
house in Florida. Her children. Happy woman and now I
(26:44):
think she was never happy in love, but she did
some extraordinary things in her life.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
And great job on that faith and what a story.
In my goodness, it wasn't the money she ever wanted,
but getting that wreck cognition by the Pioneer Freedom Foundation
in San Francisco a big deal to her. Hetty Lamar's
story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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