November 7, 2023 • 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
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 Inventors 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 she
(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 lie 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
kind of nest egg. It happened at that particular point
(04:58):
in time that a Metro Golden Mayor, 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 on the Jews. He was able to sign
(05:21):
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 after she met him in London, she basically said, no,
(05:43):
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 hansome young men on the ship. And by the
time they arrived in New York, she had a contract
(06:03):
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 widows
(06:58):
Louis b. Meyer, and from more money too. When we
come back, this remarkable life, this remarkable American life. Hetty
Lamar's life continues here on our American Stories. Folks, if
(07:30):
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, Petty 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 Verneida as a result. So from
(08:59):
there she made 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 I think nineteen forty
(09:21):
two or forty three, after she had spent the Brekquist
time living in the United States.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
While 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 new newspapers,
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 loud 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 draw 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 larger, 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 general 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
(12:14):
she thought, well, 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 a wire antenna behind it on
(12:34):
the surface to 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 kept well.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
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 (13:01):
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 used? 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 piano. They had. Then
Hetty's original idea for a radio controlled torpedo. They wanted one, however,
that couldn't be jammed by a radio signal, because if
(15:10):
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, Heeady got her
(15:31):
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 on an old
(15:53):
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 signal to the receiver in
(16:18):
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
(16:39):
physicist specialist in electronics who 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
(17:00):
worked very well. But when they 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 antil Hetty and George
then patented. It was patented under Hetty's maiden name, which
at that time was Marquis. So the patent was assigned
(17:22):
to Hedwig Marquis and George Antil, and 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,
(18:11):
and we're about to hear the final part of famous
Hollywood actress Heeddie 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
a 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 Marquis 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 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 Sauno Boy 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 Georgia Ntile. After that it spread through the military,
it became a pretty standard community vccasion systems. In the
(21:02):
nineteen seventies, 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
(21:28):
kind of 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 one hundred frequencies that you
(21:50):
could use. 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
(22:13):
basically the same 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
(22:35):
as the basis for 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's used in cell phones in the
United States, so the manufacturers decided they'd rather go with
(22:55):
something that wasn't quite as good actually, but that didn't
cost them quite so much. Make 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 laudable interest in trying to save the
lives of English children became then a patent that no
(23:20):
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 that communicates back and forth between
(23:44):
the satellites overhead and all of our ground systems, and
then eventually bluetoothed, 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 Hetty's lingering feeling as she got
(24:05):
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. But of course it had
(24:26):
all been lost in the fact that her name on
the patent wasn't Eddie Lamar. It was Head Big Marquie.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
A man in Colorado who is working on digital communications
stumbled upon the Marquie Antile 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
Head Big Markey was Heady Lamar. He had, like so
many men of his age, had been absolutely had a
crush Sean Hetty 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
(25:11):
of this culminated in the inventors kind of getting together
as 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
(25:32):
recognizing the 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
(25:54):
received the award for her. She had made a tape
for him, which he played 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,
(26:14):
she had said an inimicable Hollywood style, well it's about time. Then,
her last dream in life. This was a person who
really did accomplish the things she wanted to accomplish. Her
last goal in life was to live to the turn
of the century, which she did. She died in January
(26:36):
of the year two thousand in her little house in Florida,
near her children. A happy woman and now I 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 recognition by the Pioneer Freedom Foundation in
San Francisco a big deal to her. Hendy 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 Inventors 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 she
(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 lie 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
kind of nest egg. It happened at that particular point
(04:58):
in time that a Metro Golden Mayor, 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 on the Jews. He was able to sign
(05:21):
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 after she met him in London, she basically said, no,
(05:43):
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 hansome young men on the ship. And by the
time they arrived in New York, she had a contract
(06:03):
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 widows
(06:58):
Louis b. Meyer, and from more money too. When we
come back, this remarkable life, this remarkable American life. Hetty
Lamar's life continues here on our American Stories. Folks, if
(07:30):
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, Petty 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 Verneida as a result. So from
(08:59):
there she made 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 I think nineteen forty
(09:21):
two or forty three, after she had spent the Brekquist
time living in the United States.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
While 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 new newspapers,
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 loud 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 draw 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 larger, 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 general 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
(12:14):
she thought, well, 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 a wire antenna behind it on
(12:34):
the surface to 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 kept well.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
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 (13:01):
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 used? 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 piano. They had. Then
Hetty's original idea for a radio controlled torpedo. They wanted one, however,
that couldn't be jammed by a radio signal, because if
(15:10):
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, Heeady got her
(15:31):
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 on an old
(15:53):
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 signal to the receiver in
(16:18):
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
(16:39):
physicist specialist in electronics who 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
(17:00):
worked very well. But when they 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 antil Hetty and George
then patented. It was patented under Hetty's maiden name, which
at that time was Marquis. So the patent was assigned
(17:22):
to Hedwig Marquis and George Antil, and 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,
(18:11):
and we're about to hear the final part of famous
Hollywood actress Heeddie 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
a 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 Marquis 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 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 Sauno Boy 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 Georgia Ntile. After that it spread through the military,
it became a pretty standard community vccasion systems. In the
(21:02):
nineteen seventies, 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
(21:28):
kind of 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 one hundred frequencies that you
(21:50):
could use. 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
(22:13):
basically the same 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
(22:35):
as the basis for 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's used in cell phones in the
United States, so the manufacturers decided they'd rather go with
(22:55):
something that wasn't quite as good actually, but that didn't
cost them quite so much. Make 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 laudable interest in trying to save the
lives of English children became then a patent that no
(23:20):
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 that communicates back and forth between
(23:44):
the satellites overhead and all of our ground systems, and
then eventually bluetoothed, 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 Hetty's lingering feeling as she got
(24:05):
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. But of course it had
(24:26):
all been lost in the fact that her name on
the patent wasn't Eddie Lamar. It was Head Big Marquie.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
A man in Colorado who is working on digital communications
stumbled upon the Marquie Antile 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
Head Big Markey was Heady Lamar. He had, like so
many men of his age, had been absolutely had a
crush Sean Hetty 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
(25:11):
of this culminated in the inventors kind of getting together
as 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
(25:32):
recognizing the 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
(25:54):
received the award for her. She had made a tape
for him, which he played 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,
(26:14):
she had said an inimicable Hollywood style, well it's about time. Then,
her last dream in life. This was a person who
really did accomplish the things she wanted to accomplish. Her
last goal in life was to live to the turn
of the century, which she did. She died in January
(26:36):
of the year two thousand in her little house in Florida,
near her children. A happy woman and now I 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 recognition by the Pioneer Freedom Foundation in
San Francisco a big deal to her. Hendy Lamar's story
here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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