Heddy Lamar, War Criminal?

[William E Grim]

On Sun, 09 Mar 1997 13:14:19 -0600 (CST) LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU
writes:
>
>In light of TRP's use of pop culture and the recent debate over 
>Norbert
>Weiner, does anyone have a take on the recent revelations of how film
>star and pinup glamor queen Heddy Lamar was actually instrumental in
>the invention and development of a key component of modern guidance
>systems?  There's some convocation that's to choose Great Inventors,
>and she's a prime candidate to win!
>
>Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
>

Hedy Lamar created a guidance system that vastly improved the accuracy of
American torpedoes in WWII.  The system featured a very rapid alternation
of frequencies that was next to impossible to jam.  She was assisted in
this effort by the American composer George Antheil.  Some of you may be
familiar with Antheil who was a protege of Ezra Pound's (see Pound's
``Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony'') and was widely known throughout
Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as the ``Bad Boy of Music.''  After the
political situation in Europe deteriorated, Antheil came home to the USA
and found work in Hollywood as a very succesful film composer.  He and
Lamar were close friends who shared an interest in electronics.  As I
understand it, Lamar's first husband was an electronics expert and she
picked up many ideas from him.  Antheil had a long-standing interest in
electronic music.  After WWII was over, the Lamar-Antheil system was not
used for years until it was adopted by the engineers who developed the
second generation of cordless phones.  There was an article about this in
``The Economist' ' over  a year.  Strange, but true.

William E. Grim