August 11, 2018 • 20 mins
Today's classic revisits an episode from Sarah and Deblina. Hedy Lamarr was an extraordinarily beautiful film star, but she wasn't just another pretty face. In this podcast, Sarah and Deblina recount Hedy's biography and her little-known career as an inventor.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. Today is the seventy six the
anniversary of Hetty Lamar and h. K Mark being awarded
a patent for what they described as a quote secret
communication system. Lamar, of course, was a film star described
as the world's most beautiful woman. I would back that up.
She was absolutely stunning. And this secret communication system connects
(00:23):
to all kinds of technology that we are using today,
from WiFi to GPS, So today seemed like a good
day to share. This episode from the Archive was originally
released in twenty eleven from hosts Sarah and Bablina Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
(00:43):
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to bla a chalk re Bardy.
And when you think about old Hollywood and the most
beautiful actresses of all time time, there are probably a
lot of well known names that immediately come to mind.
(01:04):
For example, maybe Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor Grace, Kelly Audrey
Heffburne is my personal favorite. And I just saw a
Roman holiday, a great one and so pretty in that
it's like the first thing you notice, but it was
actually an actress who's probably lesser known today, Hetty Lamar,
who was billed as the most beautiful girl in the
(01:25):
world during the nineteen thirties. In the introduction to Stephen
Michael Shear's recent biography Beautiful, The Life of Hetty Lamar,
there's a description of the author's mother's experience seeing Lamar's
first American film, which was Algiers. Came out in ninety eight,
and she saw in a theater in Illinois, and she
described the experience of the first moment in the movie
(01:48):
when Lamar kind of steps out of the shadows and
you see her face for the first time, And the
author's mother says that the whole audience just gasped her beauty.
It was an audible experience. And I don't know if
many of us have had an experience like that in
a movie theater. No a uniform gasp like that. But
even though Lamar's star may have faded a bit since then,
(02:11):
many people realized in the late nineteen nineties, just a
few years before her death, that she was probably a
lot more than just a pretty face. Yeah, definitely, it
came to light at that time that many years ago
she actually invented something called spread spectrum technology, which was
used by the military and has become a component of
(02:31):
modern mobile phone technology, so definitely relevant to what we
do every day. But what we want to look at
in this episode is how did a Hollywood starlett pull
off a contribution of this caliber in the first place
and why? And of course take a look at her glamorous,
sort of bizarre life. She led a very fascinating life
(02:52):
and we can't even begin to touch on all of
the details of it here. Again, the Sheer biography that
I mentioned it actually came out last year along with
another biography, and I would definitely recommend picking that up
if you find her life of interest at all, because
it is fascinating. Yeah, but we'll give you basics. Well,
we'll take you back to the beginning like we usually do,
(03:14):
and kind of, I guess, show you how the seeds
of this innovation began. So Hetty Lamar was born head
vig Eva Maria Keisler on November nine, nine fourteen in Vienna, Austria,
and she couldn't say head VIGs, so she called herself Hetty,
which was actually pronounced Haiti. Over there, we're going to
(03:34):
go with the more anglicize. Yeah, the anglicize better known
version of her name Hetty, But that little nickname stuck,
and I say she's kind of lucky for that. Um.
She had a nice, a nice enough childhood. Definitely. Her
family was pretty well to do. They weren't extremely super wealthy,
but they were well off. Her dad, Emil, was a
(03:55):
prominent Jewish banker, and her mother, grew Trude, was a
talented pianist. Gertrude had given up her dreams of having
a career in music when she got married, and she
got pregnant very quickly after that, but she still helped
to instill a love of the arts and Hetty, who
learned to dance and play the piano from a very
young age. And because she was an only child too,
(04:16):
Hetty grows up basically like this little princess and her
parents were out socializing quite a bit, but her dad
really doated on her when he was around and played
make believe with her, told her stories, and according to Shearer,
he would also spend hours explaining how things worked to her,
(04:36):
everything from que printing presses to street cars. Um, that's
that's the first thing that sort of stands out in
this early biography. This careful attention to detail. Yep, her
curiosity is sparked at this point, but her first love,
even from a young age, is acting. Her parents, however,
were dad set against it. They did not want her
(04:58):
to be an actress, so she to actually trick her
mom into signing a slip and cut school to get
her first movie job as a script runner for Sasha
Film Studio in Vienna, and it was through this connection
that she picked up her first bit part as an
extra in the film guild alfter Strassa, which translates to
money in the Street, and it was I think originally
(05:18):
a silent film, but they added sound into it later,
so she was just a I think a person sitting
on a stool or something like that in that movie.
But a start nonetheless, And at that point she realized
that she if she was going to be a serious actor,
she needed to learn a little bit more about her craft.
So she enrolled at the legendary theatrical producer Max Reinhardt's
(05:39):
prestigious Berlin based drama school in about nineteen thirty and
initially she got some bit parts in reinhart shows and
followed him to Vienna and started to take on larger roles,
and it was he who told the press quote, Hetty
Keisler is the most beautiful girl in the world, so
sort of making that reputation and for her early on,
(06:02):
But it wasn't until two that she got her really
big break in a check film called Ecstasy, and this
is something that she's still famous for because it was
very controversial at the time for the fact that she
appeared new in it. Um this was very scandalous, especially
it would have been very scandalous to say an American
because Hollywood was comparatively very conservative at the time. So
(06:26):
the fact that she is naked in it, and there's
also a very racy sex scene kind of put her
on the map in a lot of ways, sometimes not
necessarily good ways, but there it was. So at this
point her star is definitely on the rise. But the
next step she takes in her personal life, which is marriage,
kind of puts her acting career on the back burner
for a little while. Yeah, she had a reputation for
(06:48):
maybe not picking the best of guys, and she ended
up getting married six times, but her first marriage is
the one we're going to focus on. It's very significant
because it probably planned to the seed for her eventual invention.
So she married this millionaire arms stealer named Fritz Mondel
in nineteen thirty three, and at first the two were,
(07:11):
as you put it earlier, they're just kind of playing
house with each other. Yeah, they're wealthy. As we mentioned,
she he's just buying jewels for her, and she's traveling
on his arm, on his work trips and everywhere that
he goes. And she's sort of happy because of this,
but that doesn't last. Mondel was really controlling. He kept
her from acting and even tried to buy up all
(07:33):
the copies of Ecstasy in existence because he was so
jealous about it after he saw it. He paid figures
like up to sixty dollars per copy to get all
of these, and rumor has it that even Mussolini had
a copy of Ecstasy, but he refused to sell it
to Mondel for any price that he would pay. Ye
(07:53):
don't marry Starlet's if you don't like their movies. Yeah,
it's you tell them, Sarah. But Hetty really lost all
her respect for Mondel when she found out that he
(08:14):
was making arms agreements with the Nazis, and this seemed
especially wrong to her. It's it's not just she that's
of Jewish heritage, but Mandel was himself of Jewish heritage,
and according to Shearer, he had become an honorary Arian,
which was special status created for Jewish people who served
(08:35):
Hitler personally, it seemed like the ultimate betrayal to Hetty absolutely,
and towards the end of their marriage she was very
displeased with him and was practically a prisoner in her
own home. Mondel was afraid that she would flee, so
he made the servants watcher and she couldn't leave. But
actually him forcing her to attend these meetings with technicians
(08:57):
and his munitions business partners while they were married is
part of how she got the idea and the knowledge
to help create spread spectrum technology. Yeah, but to do
anything with all this knowledge she had, she had to
get away from her husband. But what she really wanted
to do was get back into acting at that time,
So she got a maid to help her escape from
Londell's house and she was able to meet up with
(09:19):
Hollywood producer Louis B. Meyer, who she had met previously
through Reinhardt, and she got signed to MGM Studios. It
wasn't a great deal, but she was signed at least
and back on track with her career, and so in
ninety seven she was on her way to the States,
where she became known as Hetty Lamar for the first time. Yeah,
and she did a few Hollywood movies that did reasonably
(09:40):
well at the box office. Al Jeers nineteen thirty eight,
which you mentioned earlier, H M. Pullman, Esquire nineteen forty one,
Tortilla Flat in nineteen forty two, White Cargo also in
nineteen forty two. The most commercially successful film she was
in there with Samson and Delilah in nineteen forty nine. Um.
(10:00):
But even though you know this is a certain amount
of success, she probably never reached her full potential as
a Hollywood glamorous actress, right. I think most people think
that she probably doesn't get the credit that she deserves.
And she had a tough time coming in And there
were three possible reasons for that. One was that when
she initially came to the US language, the language barrier
(10:22):
and the accent, they were both problems for her when
it came to certain roles. It's been said that she
often didn't know what she was saying, and she recited
her alliance phonetically, so in her earliest film, that would
be really tough. And her beauty was one of her
greatest assets. But Meyer and MGM really didn't know what
to do with her. By most accounts, they saw her
(10:43):
as a casting challenge, which seems so strange considering that
she was so beautiful and so marketable. But they had
to end up putting her mostly in I Candy type
of roles rather than really substantive ones, because they thought
that she was basically too beautiful to be playing someone
who was normal. She couldn't be a real person. Yeah,
she couldn't be a department store clerk or someone who
(11:03):
was serving you coffee because she was just so gorgeous.
They thought that no one would believe it. Yeah, And
it wasn't just the bosses who saw her beauty as
a hindrance. She herself viewed her beauty as a weakness.
She's quoted as saying, my face has been my misfortune,
a mask I cannot remove, I must live with it.
I curse it. Yeah. I never thought I'd feel sorry
(11:24):
for someone who's so gorgeous, But that sounds awful. And
she really thought that a girl should have brains as
well as a body, and she wanted people to know
her for that. UM. One of her role models I
read somewhere was Mota Harri. One of she really admired
Mata Harry, who was a World War One spy. Admired
her because she was Mada Harry was both a military
(11:44):
expert and a seductress, So she used the mind body connection. Yeah,
and Henny Lamar also had just some plain bad luck
or maybe bad choices with her film roles. She had
an opportunity for some to star in some real a
memorable films. The main one is the lead in Casablanca. Um,
(12:05):
either she turns it down or MGM wouldn't loan her out,
but she doesn't take the role. I mean that's you
almost think her career could have been entirely different if
she had taken that role. But I guess, I guess
you never know. Maybe Casablanca just would have been entirely
different and not as memorable. But still that that looks
like a one to regret. Well. Lamar did finally get
(12:27):
the chance to put her brains to work a little
bit more when she met avant garde pianist and composer
George aunt hyle at a Hollywood dinner party. Now, an
Hyla was known for his hit Ballet Mechanique, a music
piece that was intended to be performed by several synchronized
player pianos. He also shared Lamar's hatred of the Nazis
(12:49):
and they started chatting about World War Two, which had
just begun at that time in Europe, and Lamar shared
with him her idea for a problem with torpedo control
that she'd seen Mondel struggle with. She proposed creating a
system in which the torpedo and the controller were constantly
switching frequencies so that the enemy couldn't intercept or jam
(13:09):
the signal. Yeah, which is a pretty intense conversation to
be having at this Hollywood dinner party. Definitely, um, heavy
dinner conversation. But aunt Hall was intrigued with this concept
and they met many times after that to refine this
frequency hopping technique that she had proposed and apply the
(13:30):
concepts of from his work, from his player piano work
and sound synchronization to to what she had suggested. So
before we go any further, because this all gets pretty technical,
and um, if you're like me, you need a little
(13:51):
simplification of it. So just a little explanation of frequency hopping.
And this is from a Georgia tech engineering professor, Ian
Killed his quoted in The Atlantic, and sorry Ian if
we have mispronounced your name, because it's a tough one.
He says, suppose you're setting something on channel five. When
an intruder finds out that you're sending the entire information
(14:13):
on channel five, then he or she can take everything
you're sending off channel five and reconstructed. But when you
hop around, the intruder cannot capture this hopping and he
cannot reconstruct the information. So from a security perspective, it's perfect. Yeah.
And the way that Lamar and Auntill figured out this system,
the way they conceptualized it involved paper rolls that were
(14:36):
perforated with a random pattern to delineate the frequency path.
So rolls with the same pattern would be installed in
the transmitter and in the receiver, and then just like
a conventional player piano, there would be eight rolls of
perforations for keys, and the system allowed for the use
(14:56):
of a eight different frequencies that could be changed different
intervals so they couldn't be intercepted. So everything was on
the move constantly and it was all radio controlled. So
they filed for and they received a patent for the system,
which they called Secret Communications System. But the Navy, basically
they weren't into this idea at all, so the patent
(15:18):
lay dormant basically after that for several years until the
nineteen fifties, and that was after the invention of the
transistor and others began to experiment with the concepts that
basically Lamar had laid out in the patent, but they
replaced the paper rolls with transistor based digital system. So
there were all these subsequent patents on frequency hopping, but
(15:40):
they did refer to the Lamar ont Heel one as
the generic patent, even though unfortunately it had since expired,
and we see the applications of their research all over
the place after that. By nineteen sixty two, the military
was using the same principles that Lamar and aunt Hyle
had used for secure communications. For example, I think they
(16:03):
used it during the Cuban Missile crisis that was mentioned.
And now frequency hopping is known as spread spectrum technology
as we mentioned before, and it's used in everything from
cell phones to wireless networking systems for example, c d
M A cell phone networks like Sprint and Verizon use them.
So we're gonna have to go back through the tech
stuff archives to see if we can find anything more
(16:25):
on spread spectrum. Yeah, the current uses of this Glamorous
Starlets technology definitely. As Sarah mentioned, Lamar and ant Hile's
original patent expired and they never made a dime off
of this, which is kind of sad. Yeah, no money,
no recognition until later, much later, recognition much later, not
too long after creating her invention, which didn't go anywhere
(16:47):
at the time that they actually created it, Lamar's Hollywood
career took kind of a downward turn. She sort of
flamed out at that point. Soon after that, she left
MGM of her own volition in nineteen pretty six, her
last big hit with Samson and Delilah in ninety nine.
She does movies after that, but that was kind of
her big role that she's remembered for. She retires from
(17:10):
acting entirely in nineteen fifty eight, and after retiring, she
moved to Florida and lived out the rest of her
days there. But she keeps a lot of drama in
her life, even though she's retired from the movies. As
we mentioned, six husbands, divorced six times, three kids to biological,
(17:31):
one adopted who she later disowns. She's arrested twice for shoplifting,
once in nineteen sixty six once in nineteen nine. Both
times the charges don't stick. Yeah, she was cleared. And
then she gets into it with a lot of people.
She has a strange love for litigation in her later life.
(17:52):
Collaborators on her nineteen sixty six autobiography Ecstasy in Me,
she sues them from misrepresentation. Um director mel Brooks. Many
people I'm sure have seen the film Blazing Saddles. It's
a Western spoof and there's a character in that movie
called Headley Lamar, and they sort of turned that name
(18:12):
into a prank throughout the film, and it's it's a
very funny film. But apparently Lamar did not find it
to be very funny, so she sued him for that
and they settled out of court. But despite all this drama,
she's finally recognized for her invention in when she receives
a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she
also gets some other recognition from other professional engineering groups
(18:35):
as well, but she wasn't too impressed by this attention.
I don't think her only comment on being honored was
it's about time. So sassy to the end, he Lamar
so Hetty. Lamar died in two thousand and people close
to her say that she continued to make little inventions
(18:56):
throughout her life, including a pocket for issue Kleenex boxes
where you could put your used tissues. Um, none of
these little inventions really took off, and certainly not to
the extent of her most famous invention. She can still
kind of be an inspiration to future inventors. The Boeing
Corporation actually launched a series of ads in two thousand
(19:19):
three that featured Lamar's image as a woman of science,
and the title for the ad campaign was don't let
history happen without you, and we can only assume they
waited until after her death for fear of laws. So true.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(19:41):
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com.
And then we're at missed in the history all over
social media. Is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
(20:03):
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and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. Today is the seventy six the
anniversary of Hetty Lamar and h. K Mark being awarded
a patent for what they described as a quote secret
communication system. Lamar, of course, was a film star described
as the world's most beautiful woman. I would back that up.
She was absolutely stunning. And this secret communication system connects
(00:23):
to all kinds of technology that we are using today,
from WiFi to GPS, So today seemed like a good
day to share. This episode from the Archive was originally
released in twenty eleven from hosts Sarah and Bablina Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
(00:43):
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to bla a chalk re Bardy.
And when you think about old Hollywood and the most
beautiful actresses of all time time, there are probably a
lot of well known names that immediately come to mind.
(01:04):
For example, maybe Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor Grace, Kelly Audrey
Heffburne is my personal favorite. And I just saw a
Roman holiday, a great one and so pretty in that
it's like the first thing you notice, but it was
actually an actress who's probably lesser known today, Hetty Lamar,
who was billed as the most beautiful girl in the
(01:25):
world during the nineteen thirties. In the introduction to Stephen
Michael Shear's recent biography Beautiful, The Life of Hetty Lamar,
there's a description of the author's mother's experience seeing Lamar's
first American film, which was Algiers. Came out in ninety eight,
and she saw in a theater in Illinois, and she
described the experience of the first moment in the movie
(01:48):
when Lamar kind of steps out of the shadows and
you see her face for the first time, And the
author's mother says that the whole audience just gasped her beauty.
It was an audible experience. And I don't know if
many of us have had an experience like that in
a movie theater. No a uniform gasp like that. But
even though Lamar's star may have faded a bit since then,
(02:11):
many people realized in the late nineteen nineties, just a
few years before her death, that she was probably a
lot more than just a pretty face. Yeah, definitely, it
came to light at that time that many years ago
she actually invented something called spread spectrum technology, which was
used by the military and has become a component of
(02:31):
modern mobile phone technology, so definitely relevant to what we
do every day. But what we want to look at
in this episode is how did a Hollywood starlett pull
off a contribution of this caliber in the first place
and why? And of course take a look at her glamorous,
sort of bizarre life. She led a very fascinating life
(02:52):
and we can't even begin to touch on all of
the details of it here. Again, the Sheer biography that
I mentioned it actually came out last year along with
another biography, and I would definitely recommend picking that up
if you find her life of interest at all, because
it is fascinating. Yeah, but we'll give you basics. Well,
we'll take you back to the beginning like we usually do,
(03:14):
and kind of, I guess, show you how the seeds
of this innovation began. So Hetty Lamar was born head
vig Eva Maria Keisler on November nine, nine fourteen in Vienna, Austria,
and she couldn't say head VIGs, so she called herself Hetty,
which was actually pronounced Haiti. Over there, we're going to
(03:34):
go with the more anglicize. Yeah, the anglicize better known
version of her name Hetty, But that little nickname stuck,
and I say she's kind of lucky for that. Um.
She had a nice, a nice enough childhood. Definitely. Her
family was pretty well to do. They weren't extremely super wealthy,
but they were well off. Her dad, Emil, was a
(03:55):
prominent Jewish banker, and her mother, grew Trude, was a
talented pianist. Gertrude had given up her dreams of having
a career in music when she got married, and she
got pregnant very quickly after that, but she still helped
to instill a love of the arts and Hetty, who
learned to dance and play the piano from a very
young age. And because she was an only child too,
(04:16):
Hetty grows up basically like this little princess and her
parents were out socializing quite a bit, but her dad
really doated on her when he was around and played
make believe with her, told her stories, and according to Shearer,
he would also spend hours explaining how things worked to her,
(04:36):
everything from que printing presses to street cars. Um, that's
that's the first thing that sort of stands out in
this early biography. This careful attention to detail. Yep, her
curiosity is sparked at this point, but her first love,
even from a young age, is acting. Her parents, however,
were dad set against it. They did not want her
(04:58):
to be an actress, so she to actually trick her
mom into signing a slip and cut school to get
her first movie job as a script runner for Sasha
Film Studio in Vienna, and it was through this connection
that she picked up her first bit part as an
extra in the film guild alfter Strassa, which translates to
money in the Street, and it was I think originally
(05:18):
a silent film, but they added sound into it later,
so she was just a I think a person sitting
on a stool or something like that in that movie.
But a start nonetheless, And at that point she realized
that she if she was going to be a serious actor,
she needed to learn a little bit more about her craft.
So she enrolled at the legendary theatrical producer Max Reinhardt's
(05:39):
prestigious Berlin based drama school in about nineteen thirty and
initially she got some bit parts in reinhart shows and
followed him to Vienna and started to take on larger roles,
and it was he who told the press quote, Hetty
Keisler is the most beautiful girl in the world, so
sort of making that reputation and for her early on,
(06:02):
But it wasn't until two that she got her really
big break in a check film called Ecstasy, and this
is something that she's still famous for because it was
very controversial at the time for the fact that she
appeared new in it. Um this was very scandalous, especially
it would have been very scandalous to say an American
because Hollywood was comparatively very conservative at the time. So
(06:26):
the fact that she is naked in it, and there's
also a very racy sex scene kind of put her
on the map in a lot of ways, sometimes not
necessarily good ways, but there it was. So at this
point her star is definitely on the rise. But the
next step she takes in her personal life, which is marriage,
kind of puts her acting career on the back burner
for a little while. Yeah, she had a reputation for
(06:48):
maybe not picking the best of guys, and she ended
up getting married six times, but her first marriage is
the one we're going to focus on. It's very significant
because it probably planned to the seed for her eventual invention.
So she married this millionaire arms stealer named Fritz Mondel
in nineteen thirty three, and at first the two were,
(07:11):
as you put it earlier, they're just kind of playing
house with each other. Yeah, they're wealthy. As we mentioned,
she he's just buying jewels for her, and she's traveling
on his arm, on his work trips and everywhere that
he goes. And she's sort of happy because of this,
but that doesn't last. Mondel was really controlling. He kept
her from acting and even tried to buy up all
(07:33):
the copies of Ecstasy in existence because he was so
jealous about it after he saw it. He paid figures
like up to sixty dollars per copy to get all
of these, and rumor has it that even Mussolini had
a copy of Ecstasy, but he refused to sell it
to Mondel for any price that he would pay. Ye
(07:53):
don't marry Starlet's if you don't like their movies. Yeah,
it's you tell them, Sarah. But Hetty really lost all
her respect for Mondel when she found out that he
(08:14):
was making arms agreements with the Nazis, and this seemed
especially wrong to her. It's it's not just she that's
of Jewish heritage, but Mandel was himself of Jewish heritage,
and according to Shearer, he had become an honorary Arian,
which was special status created for Jewish people who served
(08:35):
Hitler personally, it seemed like the ultimate betrayal to Hetty absolutely,
and towards the end of their marriage she was very
displeased with him and was practically a prisoner in her
own home. Mondel was afraid that she would flee, so
he made the servants watcher and she couldn't leave. But
actually him forcing her to attend these meetings with technicians
(08:57):
and his munitions business partners while they were married is
part of how she got the idea and the knowledge
to help create spread spectrum technology. Yeah, but to do
anything with all this knowledge she had, she had to
get away from her husband. But what she really wanted
to do was get back into acting at that time,
So she got a maid to help her escape from
Londell's house and she was able to meet up with
(09:19):
Hollywood producer Louis B. Meyer, who she had met previously
through Reinhardt, and she got signed to MGM Studios. It
wasn't a great deal, but she was signed at least
and back on track with her career, and so in
ninety seven she was on her way to the States,
where she became known as Hetty Lamar for the first time. Yeah,
and she did a few Hollywood movies that did reasonably
(09:40):
well at the box office. Al Jeers nineteen thirty eight,
which you mentioned earlier, H M. Pullman, Esquire nineteen forty one,
Tortilla Flat in nineteen forty two, White Cargo also in
nineteen forty two. The most commercially successful film she was
in there with Samson and Delilah in nineteen forty nine. Um.
(10:00):
But even though you know this is a certain amount
of success, she probably never reached her full potential as
a Hollywood glamorous actress, right. I think most people think
that she probably doesn't get the credit that she deserves.
And she had a tough time coming in And there
were three possible reasons for that. One was that when
she initially came to the US language, the language barrier
(10:22):
and the accent, they were both problems for her when
it came to certain roles. It's been said that she
often didn't know what she was saying, and she recited
her alliance phonetically, so in her earliest film, that would
be really tough. And her beauty was one of her
greatest assets. But Meyer and MGM really didn't know what
to do with her. By most accounts, they saw her
(10:43):
as a casting challenge, which seems so strange considering that
she was so beautiful and so marketable. But they had
to end up putting her mostly in I Candy type
of roles rather than really substantive ones, because they thought
that she was basically too beautiful to be playing someone
who was normal. She couldn't be a real person. Yeah,
she couldn't be a department store clerk or someone who
(11:03):
was serving you coffee because she was just so gorgeous.
They thought that no one would believe it. Yeah, And
it wasn't just the bosses who saw her beauty as
a hindrance. She herself viewed her beauty as a weakness.
She's quoted as saying, my face has been my misfortune,
a mask I cannot remove, I must live with it.
I curse it. Yeah. I never thought I'd feel sorry
(11:24):
for someone who's so gorgeous, But that sounds awful. And
she really thought that a girl should have brains as
well as a body, and she wanted people to know
her for that. UM. One of her role models I
read somewhere was Mota Harri. One of she really admired
Mata Harry, who was a World War One spy. Admired
her because she was Mada Harry was both a military
(11:44):
expert and a seductress, So she used the mind body connection. Yeah,
and Henny Lamar also had just some plain bad luck
or maybe bad choices with her film roles. She had
an opportunity for some to star in some real a
memorable films. The main one is the lead in Casablanca. Um,
(12:05):
either she turns it down or MGM wouldn't loan her out,
but she doesn't take the role. I mean that's you
almost think her career could have been entirely different if
she had taken that role. But I guess, I guess
you never know. Maybe Casablanca just would have been entirely
different and not as memorable. But still that that looks
like a one to regret. Well. Lamar did finally get
(12:27):
the chance to put her brains to work a little
bit more when she met avant garde pianist and composer
George aunt hyle at a Hollywood dinner party. Now, an
Hyla was known for his hit Ballet Mechanique, a music
piece that was intended to be performed by several synchronized
player pianos. He also shared Lamar's hatred of the Nazis
(12:49):
and they started chatting about World War Two, which had
just begun at that time in Europe, and Lamar shared
with him her idea for a problem with torpedo control
that she'd seen Mondel struggle with. She proposed creating a
system in which the torpedo and the controller were constantly
switching frequencies so that the enemy couldn't intercept or jam
(13:09):
the signal. Yeah, which is a pretty intense conversation to
be having at this Hollywood dinner party. Definitely, um, heavy
dinner conversation. But aunt Hall was intrigued with this concept
and they met many times after that to refine this
frequency hopping technique that she had proposed and apply the
(13:30):
concepts of from his work, from his player piano work
and sound synchronization to to what she had suggested. So
before we go any further, because this all gets pretty technical,
and um, if you're like me, you need a little
(13:51):
simplification of it. So just a little explanation of frequency hopping.
And this is from a Georgia tech engineering professor, Ian
Killed his quoted in The Atlantic, and sorry Ian if
we have mispronounced your name, because it's a tough one.
He says, suppose you're setting something on channel five. When
an intruder finds out that you're sending the entire information
(14:13):
on channel five, then he or she can take everything
you're sending off channel five and reconstructed. But when you
hop around, the intruder cannot capture this hopping and he
cannot reconstruct the information. So from a security perspective, it's perfect. Yeah.
And the way that Lamar and Auntill figured out this system,
the way they conceptualized it involved paper rolls that were
(14:36):
perforated with a random pattern to delineate the frequency path.
So rolls with the same pattern would be installed in
the transmitter and in the receiver, and then just like
a conventional player piano, there would be eight rolls of
perforations for keys, and the system allowed for the use
(14:56):
of a eight different frequencies that could be changed different
intervals so they couldn't be intercepted. So everything was on
the move constantly and it was all radio controlled. So
they filed for and they received a patent for the system,
which they called Secret Communications System. But the Navy, basically
they weren't into this idea at all, so the patent
(15:18):
lay dormant basically after that for several years until the
nineteen fifties, and that was after the invention of the
transistor and others began to experiment with the concepts that
basically Lamar had laid out in the patent, but they
replaced the paper rolls with transistor based digital system. So
there were all these subsequent patents on frequency hopping, but
(15:40):
they did refer to the Lamar ont Heel one as
the generic patent, even though unfortunately it had since expired,
and we see the applications of their research all over
the place after that. By nineteen sixty two, the military
was using the same principles that Lamar and aunt Hyle
had used for secure communications. For example, I think they
(16:03):
used it during the Cuban Missile crisis that was mentioned.
And now frequency hopping is known as spread spectrum technology
as we mentioned before, and it's used in everything from
cell phones to wireless networking systems for example, c d
M A cell phone networks like Sprint and Verizon use them.
So we're gonna have to go back through the tech
stuff archives to see if we can find anything more
(16:25):
on spread spectrum. Yeah, the current uses of this Glamorous
Starlets technology definitely. As Sarah mentioned, Lamar and ant Hile's
original patent expired and they never made a dime off
of this, which is kind of sad. Yeah, no money,
no recognition until later, much later, recognition much later, not
too long after creating her invention, which didn't go anywhere
(16:47):
at the time that they actually created it, Lamar's Hollywood
career took kind of a downward turn. She sort of
flamed out at that point. Soon after that, she left
MGM of her own volition in nineteen pretty six, her
last big hit with Samson and Delilah in ninety nine.
She does movies after that, but that was kind of
her big role that she's remembered for. She retires from
(17:10):
acting entirely in nineteen fifty eight, and after retiring, she
moved to Florida and lived out the rest of her
days there. But she keeps a lot of drama in
her life, even though she's retired from the movies. As
we mentioned, six husbands, divorced six times, three kids to biological,
(17:31):
one adopted who she later disowns. She's arrested twice for shoplifting,
once in nineteen sixty six once in nineteen nine. Both
times the charges don't stick. Yeah, she was cleared. And
then she gets into it with a lot of people.
She has a strange love for litigation in her later life.
(17:52):
Collaborators on her nineteen sixty six autobiography Ecstasy in Me,
she sues them from misrepresentation. Um director mel Brooks. Many
people I'm sure have seen the film Blazing Saddles. It's
a Western spoof and there's a character in that movie
called Headley Lamar, and they sort of turned that name
(18:12):
into a prank throughout the film, and it's it's a
very funny film. But apparently Lamar did not find it
to be very funny, so she sued him for that
and they settled out of court. But despite all this drama,
she's finally recognized for her invention in when she receives
a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she
also gets some other recognition from other professional engineering groups
(18:35):
as well, but she wasn't too impressed by this attention.
I don't think her only comment on being honored was
it's about time. So sassy to the end, he Lamar
so Hetty. Lamar died in two thousand and people close
to her say that she continued to make little inventions
(18:56):
throughout her life, including a pocket for issue Kleenex boxes
where you could put your used tissues. Um, none of
these little inventions really took off, and certainly not to
the extent of her most famous invention. She can still
kind of be an inspiration to future inventors. The Boeing
Corporation actually launched a series of ads in two thousand
(19:19):
three that featured Lamar's image as a woman of science,
and the title for the ad campaign was don't let
history happen without you, and we can only assume they
waited until after her death for fear of laws. So true.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(19:41):
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com.
And then we're at missed in the history all over
social media. Is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
(20:03):
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