Heddy Lamar, War Criminal?

[j minnich]

Grim writes:
>
>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.
>

I used to work on radar systems designed in the fifties that used frequency
hopping to avoid jamming, but I thought Howard Hughes had more to do wiv
that than Heddy Lammar.  Now then, when you say "second generation of
cordless phones" do you really mean cordless phones or do you mean second
generation cellular, like in PCS and CDMA?                 -j minnich
---------------------------------------------------------------
...The poet is dead.
Nor will ever again hear the sea lions 
Grunt in the kelp at Point Lobos.
Nor look to the south when the grunion 
Run the Pacific, and the plunging
Shearwaters, insatiable, 
Stun themselves in the sea.  
   -Wm. Everson