Doing some research for a Charles & Raven sibling story I'm writing for ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yetanothermask, I came across something that impressed and amused me in its attention to detail and implications, which I hadn't known before. If you've watched X-Men: First Class, you may or may not recall that right at the start of the sequence where child!Charles meets child!Raven, we see three photos next to young Charles Xavier's bedside. ( In X-Men: Days of Future Past these three photos are replaced by a single one, showing Raven herself.) Whom do these three pictures show? Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Hedy Lamarr.
Now the reasons why young Charles would hero worship Einstein and Darwin are obvious, and I had assumed Lamarr was there to indicate Charles' fondness for the pretty, since she was an actress famed for erotic glamour. (I associated her mainly with Delilah in Samson and Delilah by Cecil B. De Mille. Oh, and I also knew when she was still in Austria - she was Austrian-Jewish and left at the obvious time; her ashes were brought to the Wienerwald by her daughter, though - she became famous simulating an orgasm on screen.) Now, being thorough and not knowing much else about Hedy Lamarr, I googled her, and it turns out she was also an inventor. (Check out her wikipedia entry for starters.) Since I suppose I'm not the only person who didn't know Hedy Lamarr pioneered techniques that would eventually lead to wi fi, here's the section dealing with her contribution to science:
Avant garde composer George Antheil (died 1959), a son of German immigrants and a neighbor of Lamarr in California, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mécanique, originally written for Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.
During World War II, Antheil and Lamarr discussed the fact that radio-controlled torpedoes, while important in the naval war, could easily be jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, causing the torpedo to go off course. Lamarr had learned something about torpedoes from Mandl. Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping to avoid jamming: using a piano roll to unpredictably change the signal sent between a control center and the torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies in the radio-frequency spectrum (there are 88 black and white keys on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. It would be practically impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies, as this would require too much power or complexity. The frequency-hopping sequence was controlled by a player-piano mechanism, which Antheill had earlier used to score his Ballet Mecanique.
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey, Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping, although novel, soon met with opposition from the U.S. Navy and was not adopted. The idea was not implemented in the US until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. Her work was honored in 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr a belated award for her contributions. In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN Inc., acquired a 49% claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock.
Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM (used in Wi-Fi network connections), and CDMA (used in some cordless and wireless telephones). Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 patent seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil's patent, which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds.
Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2014.
That Hedy Lamarr's idea was used during the blockade in Cuba - without her getting the credit at the time - makes of course a great connection to what adult Charles & friends are doing in First Class. But even without that serendipity: doesn't she sound fascinating? No wonder young Charles crushed on her. Retrospectively now, so do I.
yetanothermask, I came across something that impressed and amused me in its attention to detail and implications, which I hadn't known before. If you've watched X-Men: First Class, you may or may not recall that right at the start of the sequence where child!Charles meets child!Raven, we see three photos next to young Charles Xavier's bedside. ( In X-Men: Days of Future Past these three photos are replaced by a single one, showing Raven herself.) Whom do these three pictures show? Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Hedy Lamarr. Now the reasons why young Charles would hero worship Einstein and Darwin are obvious, and I had assumed Lamarr was there to indicate Charles' fondness for the pretty, since she was an actress famed for erotic glamour. (I associated her mainly with Delilah in Samson and Delilah by Cecil B. De Mille. Oh, and I also knew when she was still in Austria - she was Austrian-Jewish and left at the obvious time; her ashes were brought to the Wienerwald by her daughter, though - she became famous simulating an orgasm on screen.) Now, being thorough and not knowing much else about Hedy Lamarr, I googled her, and it turns out she was also an inventor. (Check out her wikipedia entry for starters.) Since I suppose I'm not the only person who didn't know Hedy Lamarr pioneered techniques that would eventually lead to wi fi, here's the section dealing with her contribution to science:
Avant garde composer George Antheil (died 1959), a son of German immigrants and a neighbor of Lamarr in California, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mécanique, originally written for Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.
During World War II, Antheil and Lamarr discussed the fact that radio-controlled torpedoes, while important in the naval war, could easily be jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, causing the torpedo to go off course. Lamarr had learned something about torpedoes from Mandl. Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping to avoid jamming: using a piano roll to unpredictably change the signal sent between a control center and the torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies in the radio-frequency spectrum (there are 88 black and white keys on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. It would be practically impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies, as this would require too much power or complexity. The frequency-hopping sequence was controlled by a player-piano mechanism, which Antheill had earlier used to score his Ballet Mecanique.
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey, Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping, although novel, soon met with opposition from the U.S. Navy and was not adopted. The idea was not implemented in the US until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. Her work was honored in 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr a belated award for her contributions. In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN Inc., acquired a 49% claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock.
Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM (used in Wi-Fi network connections), and CDMA (used in some cordless and wireless telephones). Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 patent seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil's patent, which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds.
Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2014.
That Hedy Lamarr's idea was used during the blockade in Cuba - without her getting the credit at the time - makes of course a great connection to what adult Charles & friends are doing in First Class. But even without that serendipity: doesn't she sound fascinating? No wonder young Charles crushed on her. Retrospectively now, so do I.
