Creative Ecstasy

Be Beautiful, Brilliant, and Bold

Frequenzsprungverfahren

“I’m a sworn enemy of the convention.  I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts”

Hedwig Kiesler, was declared the “most beautiful women in the world,” but she quickly got bored of the sobriquet.  She did not play the Hollywood game.  She spent many of her evenings creating.  But few would know, what she was creating for it was classified as secret for 40 years.

“Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid”

Six different husbands.  All married her for different reasons.  But not any like her father.  He loved his daughter for her intelligence, not for her beauty.  It was he, who encouraged her to ask how things work, which gave her a supreme self confidence even by the tender age of 15.  “I must make my own decisions.  Mould my own character, think my own thoughts.”

“My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles.”
Born in Vienna in 1913, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, aka Hedy Lamarr, always wanted to be an movie star. She saw it as being creative.
“I acted all the time.  I copied my mother, I copied the way she walked and the way she talked.  I copied her mannerisms.  Her facial expression.  I copied the guests who came to the house.  I copied people in the streets.  I copied the servants. I was a little living copybook.  I wrote people down on me.”

She studied ballet and piano at age 10. When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the “most beautiful woman in Europe”. Soon the teenage girl was playing major roles in German movies alongside stars like Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser.

Reinhardt’s play, A Weaker Sex, her first play, Hedy knew what she wanted and knew how to get it.  She had gotten the part in Berlin and when Reinhardt moved the play to Vienna, she strategically followed and got the part again.  Her fellow actor, George Weller, an American, figured he would make an American out of her and teach her English, since her part in the play was as an American. Hedy was very eager:  Hollywood was a beacon.

“She was eager to be transformed. ‘Hedy had only the vaguest ideas of the United States were,’ Weller discovered, ‘except they were grouped around Hollywood.” [Hedy’s Folly, by Richard Rhodes]

Ekstase (Ecstasy).  “I’ve never been satisfied, she explained, I’ve no sooner done one thing, then I am seething inside me to do another thing.”  Seeing her work in Berlin, Czech director Gustave Machaty, offered her the lead in his film the love story: Ekstase.  The film was a sensation, scandalous, and challenged convention.  Reversing roles of  men and women, releasing people for a newer, healthier freedom.

In Europe and America, the old ways wanted women to be seen but not heard.  Hedy wanted her independence and her career.

She learned the hard way with her first marriage.  Friedrich Mandl was a powerful, very rich and canny businessman.  “Hedy’s model of man was her father, if her father was frigate, Mandl was a battleship.”  Hedy said “Mandl knew everything and had everything.” Married at 19, Hedy soon found herself locked in a golden and guilded prison: “I was a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded — and imprisoned — having no mind, no life of its own.”

She finally escape from Europe, from the gathering storm of war, and from her guilded cage.  She strategically landed on the shores of America with a very lucrative contract from Louis B Mayer, the stingy, crass fatherly figure that was in control of Metro, Godwyn, Mayer (MGM)  movie studios in Hollywood.  Fame followed, for it was the golden age of movie making and the Studio system in Hollywood.  And she was touted as “the most beautiful woman in the world” by Mayer.

But she soon was bored in Tinsel Town.  Hollywood parties, and those people who flocked to them, were not very interesting.  Without stimulating conversation, Hedy preferred to spend her evening time on “her inventions.”   You see, Hedy Lamarr was an Inventor Rational.

“She had a ‘drawing room’  filled both with unreadable books and very useable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use.  …   Believe it or not,  Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents!  — George Antheil (Hedy’s co-inventor and patent holder of US Patent 2292387: Secret Communication System.)
They are intensely curious and continuously probe for possibilities, especially when trying to solve complex problems. Inventors are filled with ideas, but value ideas only when they make possible actions and objects. Thus they see product design not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, as a way of devising the prototype that works and that can be brought to market.

Inventors are usually non-conformists in the workplace, and can succeed in many areas as long as the job does not involve too much humdrum routine. They make good leaders on pilot projects that test their ingenuity. And they are skilled at engineering human relationships and human systems, quickly grasping the politics of institutions and always wanting to understand the people within the system rather than tell them what to do. No matter what their occupation, however, Inventors display an extraordinary talent for rising to the demands of even the most impossible situations. “It can’t be done” is a challenge to an Inventor and elicits a reaction of “I can do it.”

One can speculate on what those  “unreadable books” were about, but clearly Hedy was underestimated even by her co-inventor of that Patent 22923387.  Without a doubt those engineering books with formulas and equations, weren’t there to look pretty. She read those books.  Hedy Lamarr had the intelligence and drive to not only understand how things worked but also able to engineer and design very complex mechanisms in her own mind.  She had enough intelligence to “stand still and look stupid” — and invent  — to think completely a new thought that nobody had thought of before – Frequenzsprungverfahren.  That is, “frequency hopping” or in 40 years later terminology “spread spectrum technology”  — the basis of all cell phone communication of 21st century.

“Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever.”   — Hedy Lamarr

It was no small wonder Hedy Lamarr’s other five marriages did not endure.  Those guys in and around Hollywood never understood or valued Hedy for her intellect, and never were able to stand up to her model of a perfect mindmate as she experience with her father.

Quote1.pngI am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father’s equal, and I never loved any other man as much..Quote2.png

11 thoughts on “Creative Ecstasy”

  1. Incorrect attribution of cell phone spread spectrum (CDMA) to Hedy Lamarr.

    There are 2 kinds of Spread spectrum
    1. Frequency hopping (FHSS) patented by Hedy Lamrr et al. in 1941
    2. Direct Sequence (DSSS) published in 1935 by professor Dmitriy V. Ageev. see wiki on CDMA

    CDMA uses DSSS invented by Dimitry Ageev and not the FHSS invented by Hedy. Hedy was a very smart gal but she did not invent CDMA.,

    Hedy’s FHSS is used in many private wireless control links that are commonly used by industry and municipal government (typically SCADA use). Hedy’s FHSS is not currently or ever has been used by any mobile telephone standard any place in the world.

    The military still uses Hed’y FHSS for secure voice and data communication because it is harder to jam than DSSS (aka CDMA) .

    DSSS (CDMA) is used for mobile phone systems instead of the Lamar FHAA becasue is has some spectral usage efficiencies better suited for mobile phone systems. Qualcom has 200+ patents related to it’s use in mobile phone systems. The Mobile phone system does not need the better Jamming resistance properties of Hedy’s FHSS because the Mobile phone spectrum is protected from jamming by licensing and its enforcement.

  2. From that paper and research:

    //There are basically two types of Spread Spectrum modulation techniques: Frequency Hopping

    (FHSS) and Direct Sequence (DSSS).

    This white paper presents these two “competing” technologies comparing their performance

    relative to a few parameters of crucial importance in communications systems:

    – possibility to collocate systems – noise and interference immunity – data transfer capacity

    (throughput) – operation in environments generating radio reflections – security – resistance to

    interference generated by Bluetooth / IEEE 802.15 WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Networks).

    The conclusion will be – as expected – that there is no “good” technology and “bad” technology, but

    that there are applications were FHSS performs better than DSSS, and obviously there are

    applications were the opposite is true.

    This white paper explores the two technologies for the purpose of identifying these applications//

  3. Or, again, from this paper:

    //And for those interested just in the conclusions, here they are:

    DSSS has the advantage of providing higher capacities than FHSS, but it is a very sensitive

    technology, influenced by many environment factors (mainly reflections). The best way to minimize

    such influences is to use the technology in either (i) point to multipoint, short distances applications

    or (ii) long distance applications, but point to point topologies.

    In both cases the systems can take advantage of the high capacity offered by DSSS technology,

    without paying the price of being disturbed by the effect of reflections.

    As so, typical DSSS applications include indoor wireless LAN in offices (i), building to building links

    (ii), Point of Presence (PoP) to Base Station links (in cellular deployment systems) (ii), etc.

    On the other hand, FHSS is a very robust technology, with little influence from noises, reflections,

    other radio stations or other environment factors. In addition, the number of simultaneously active

    systems in the same geographic area (collocated systems) is significantly higher than the

    equivalent number for DSSS systems.

    All these features make the FHSS technology the one to be selected for installations designed to

    cover big areas where a big number of collocated systems is required and where the use of

    directional antennas in order to minimize environment factors influence is impossible.

    Typical applications for FHSS include cellular deployments for fixed Broadband Wireless Access

    (BWA), where the use of DSSS is virtually impossible because of its limitations.//

  4. I don’t like conventional arts either. If I was a famous celebrity, Hollywood Artisans wouldn’t appeal to me either. I just don’t think this is enough to go on to conclude that she is a Rational Inventor. She could have been have a very smart Artisan trying to impress others when they “just happen” to find her complex books. She could have been an Idealists trying to impress others the same way. My Idealist Champion brother does that. He has a “study” with religious and philosophical books in it. He smokes a pipe (and chokes on it). He’s attempting to grow a Rasputin-length beard. He has religious, esoteric artifacts hanging on the wall. My brother has ALWAYS been about trying to look brilliant rather than actually being brilliant. And there’s really no way to tell that Mrs. Kesler was being any different.

    1. You are right, nothing is for certain, and Temperament is just a framework. But, read the book, Hedy’s Folly by Richard Rhodes — and there was only one conclusion I could reach — she was an Inventor Rational.

  5. Technically the words, “I am the sworn enemy of the conventional” are communicated by language-which is a convention.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *