Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
propellers. The musicians playing these bizarre instruments were there to perform a piece called Ballet Mécanique, written by the twenty-four-year-old American composer George Antheil. Like many Jazz Age artists and intellectuals, Antheil had left the banal Americana of his upbringing and set sail for the bright lights and bonhomie
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of civilian wireless communications. As it happens, to make that leap, Antheil needed the most unlikely partner imaginable: Hedy Lamarr, at the time one of the most glamorous movie stars in the world. Hedy Lamarr Ignored for many decades, the story of Lamarr and Antheil’s strange-bedfellows collaboration has in recent years become
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crisis. Today, frequency hopping has evolved into the spread-spectrum technology used by numerous essential wireless systems, including cell-phone networks, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. — George Antheil correctly foresaw the extraordinary explosion of new sounds that the age of electricity promised, though he may have been a bit shortsighted about the data
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Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Vintage, 2012). “The Ballet began”: Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 68. “outsacked the Sacre”: Paul Lehrman, “Blast from the Past,” Wired, November 1, 1999
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R. Wagner. Classical Conditioning: Current Research and Theory. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts: 1972. Rhodes, Richard. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Riskin, Jessica. “The Defecating Duck, Or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” Critical Inquiry
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold · 24 Dec 2011
of dollars per month in “local loop” costs. When Hughes told me that the idea of “frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum” radio first occurred to actress Hedy Lamarr while she played four-handed piano, I knew I was in for a tale. Sure enough, Lamarr was born Hedwig Maria Eva Kiesler, an Austrian
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marriage and the Nazi regime, Hedwig drugged her maid, escaped to England and then to Hollywood, where she became Hedy Lamarr. One night, while playing four-handed piano with avant garde composer George Antheil, she thought of a way to solve the problem of radio-guided torpedoes. Lamarr recalled from her ex-husband’s
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Idea,” Wired News, 11 March 1997, <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,2507,00.html > (14 October 2001). 54. Chris Beaumont, “Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, and the Secret Communications System Patent,” <http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html > (23 February 2002). 55. Peter H. Dana, “Global Positioning System Overview,”
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World
by Greg Milner · 4 May 2016 · 385pp · 103,561 words
technology, of which the GPS signal is one form, has an unlikely provenance. In the early 1940s, the actress Hedy Lamarr, at the pinnacle of her Hollywood fame, collaborated with the composer George Antheil on a wartime idea they believed would prevent jamming of the signals sent to radio-controlled torpedoes. They proposed spreading
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Stephen T. Powers, “Fighting to Survive: Five Challenges, One Key Technology, the Political Battlefield—and a GPS Mafia,” GPS World, June 2010. 54 the actress Hedy Lamarr: Len Jacobson, Flying For GPS (Xlibris, 2014), 34. 55 This is what every GPS receiver: For a concise explanation of GPS and spread-spectrum signals
You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray · 31 Mar 2014 · 316pp · 90,165 words
in 1903. Years later actress Hedy Lamarr secured a patent of her own. Under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Lamarr still found time to dabble in technical matters that had fascinated her since her abortive marriage to an Austrian arms merchant. She and a friend, film music composer George Antheil, designed a frequency-hopping
Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet
by Ian Hanington · 13 May 2012 · 258pp · 77,601 words
we are a part. If our leaders reject science, we really are in trouble. Sometimes it does take a rocket scientist... to take on Hollywood HEDY LAMARR WAS once regarded as the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. In 1933, she scandalously appeared nude in a Czech film called Ecstasy, which brought her
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fact, we have her to thank for some of the technology used in cellphones and the Internet. In 1940, Lamarr and avant-garde music composer George Antheil devised and patented a communications system based on “frequency hopping” for use in radio-guided torpedoes. Their invention was inspired by player piano rolls—spools
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words
new computational power and a frequency-hopping technique called “spread-spectrum,” originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II by actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil, to simply weave its signals around any interference.22 The result was that computers could now shove almost as much data across the public
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the Crowley and Rainert) to check in on the third version of Dodgeball. 21Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 22Laura Barnett, “If It Wasn’t For Hedy Lamarr, We Wouldn’t Have Wi-Fi,” The Guardian, last modified December 4, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2011/dec/04
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/hedy-lamarr-wifi. 23“A Brief History of Wi-Fi,” The Economist, June 10, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/2724397. 24Alvin F. Harlow, Old Wires and
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig · 14 Jul 2001 · 494pp · 142,285 words
radio spectrum.23 The idea for this way of allocating spectrum reaches back to World War II, and to the work of actress Hedy Lamarr.24 Lamarr and her partner, George Antheil, were exploring ways for submarines to communicate without detection. They invented a system where a transmitter would hop along the radio spectrum
When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld · 15 Feb 1999 · 238pp · 46 words
uses an identical copy to recover the message (this idea can be traced back to the ac- 166 + WHEN THINGS START TO THINK tress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil using piano rolls in World War II). This is what you hear when your modem hisses. The catch is that if the receiver is