I'm going to try to blog a bit more than I have in recent years. Let's see how long that lasts :)
With that said, every so often I’m reminded that history has a curious way of simplifying people. It tends to compress them into a single label that’s easy to remember and easier to repeat. Unfortunately, that compression often throws away the more interesting parts. A recent example that crossed my mind again is Hedy Lamarr.
But before getting there, I can’t resist a short (related) diversion. Anyone who has seen Blazing Saddles will remember the villainous politician Hedley Lamarr, played by Harvey Korman. The running joke throughout the film is his exasperation whenever someone calls him “Hedy”, to which he always replies:“That’s Hedley!”
The joke works because everyone immediately thinks of the Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr. The film plays the misunderstanding purely for laughs. However, the irony is that the real Hedy Lamarr is misunderstood in a far more interesting way which, when I first watched Blazing Saddles in the early 80's, I missed because I assumed she was "just" an actress. Most people remember her only as a film star from Hollywood’s golden era. She appeared in many films and for a time she was widely described as one of the most beautiful women in the world. That’s the version of the story that tends to survive, but it’s not the whole story. In the late 90's when I finally learned about her full story, I was truly impressed.
Away from the film sets, Lamarr had a strong interest in engineering and invention. During World War II, she collaborated with composer George Antheil on a system intended to prevent radio-controlled torpedoes from being jammed. The basic idea was what we now call Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS). In simple terms, instead of transmitting a signal on a single radio frequency, where an enemy could easily disrupt it, the signal rapidly switches among many frequencies according to a shared pattern. If you know the pattern, you can follow the signal. If you don’t, you mostly hear noise.
In 1942 they were granted a patent for the idea. At the time, the technology needed to implement it practically wasn’t quite there. The design even proposed using synchronised mechanisms inspired by player pianos to coordinate the frequency changes. Ingenious, but perhaps a little ahead of the available hardware. The US Navy politely filed the patent away and everyone moved on to other things. Decades later, however, the principle became foundational for modern wireless communications. Technologies such as Spread Spectrum Communication underpin things we now take entirely for granted, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and parts of CDMA cellular systems.
So why is Lamarr’s contribution often overlooked? Part of it is timing. The patent wasn’t widely used until decades later, long after the moment when the story could have been told differently. Part of it is categorisation. Once someone has been placed firmly in one box (“Hollywood actress” in her case) it’s surprisingly difficult for the historical narrative to accommodate a second identity. And part of it is that innovation rarely happens in isolation. Ideas evolve, get refined and are rediscovered by later engineers. Along the way attribution becomes diffuse. But occasionally it’s worth pausing and remembering the earlier step in that chain.
Since I first learned about it, I’ve found Lamarr’s story interesting not only because of the invention itself, but because it highlights something about how we think about expertise: we tend to assume that people operate in neat domains, such as engineers design systems, artists create art and of course, actors act. Unsurprisingly, reality is a bit messier.
Lamarr happened to be all three things: an actress, an inventor, and someone with a genuine curiosity about how things worked. The world often remembers the first label and quietly drops the others, which is a pity, because the second one might be her more interesting legacy.
Before I sign off, let's take a quick trip back to Hedley The next time you watch Blazing Saddles (thoroughly recommended if you've not seen it so far!) and hear the immortal protest: “That’s Hedley, not Hedy!” …it might be worth remembering that the real Hedy Lamarr deserves to be remembered for considerably more than the joke. Not bad for someone history insists on filing under “actress”.
