Hedy's Folly (20 page)

At the beginning of September 1942, at a luncheon in Philadelphia with a $5,000-war-bond minimum, Hedy told the group of businessmen and labor and social leaders to “
chip in and help Uncle Sam win this war,” adding, “I am just a plain gold-digger for Uncle Sam. I’m here to help win the war. I think you’re here to see what that Lamarr dame looks like.” Then, in what the
New York Times
reporter on the scene called “a serious tone,” she went on:

We should be here for the same purpose. What you think Hedy Lamarr looks like doesn’t worry me as much as what Hirohito and Hitler are doing. Every time you dig in your pocketbooks you tell those two rotten men the Yanks are coming. Let’s make the end of the war come soon. Don’t think about what the other fellow is doing. You buy bonds!

And they did, $4,547,350 worth ($62,344,000 today) among them, with another $2,250,000 ($30,847,000) pledged at a
“victory show” Hedy headlined at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music that evening. Two days later, the
Times
reported, she knocked them dead in Newark:

NEWARK, N.J., Sept. 4—Hedy Lamarr, motion-picture star, took Newark by storm when she arrived here today to urge the purchase of war bonds. More than 7,000 persons blocked her path when she emerged from the Robert Treat Hotel and, later, in Military Park, it took more than a score of policemen to control a crowd estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000.

Several women fainted. Hundreds of camera fans took pictures of the Hollywood celebrity.

When Miss Lamarr rode along Broad Street in a jeep, bus passengers stood up to wave, motorists honked their horns and many youths attempted to reach her conveyance on bicycles. The crowds were too large to permit many direct sales of bonds, but a score of women volunteers experienced no trouble in obtaining signed pledges.

A young Walter Cronkite introduced her at a rally that evening in Trenton.

A week later, back in New York, Hedy stood with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as he announced Carole Lombard Memorial Week. (The thirty-three-year-old actress, the wife
of Clark Gable, had been killed in a plane crash the previous January on her way home from an Indiana war-bond rally.) By 14 September, when Hedy arrived back in Los Angeles, she had sold almost $25 million ($343 million) in bonds.

She found a more intimate opportunity to serve her adopted country in October when the newly organized Hollywood Canteen opened its doors. Bette Davis and John Garfield had organized the club with support from the Music Corporation of America. The Hollywood Canteen served military men and women in uniform—their admission ticket—most of whom were awaiting shipment overseas. Hedy worked there faithfully twice a week, typically wearing a dirndl skirt and blouse, dancing with the servicemen and washing dishes.

That year Bette Davis introduced her to the actor John Loder, another tall, handsome older man. Loder was English, Eton educated, the son of a British general, and a veteran of the bloody campaign at Gallipoli during World War I. They married in May 1943, when Loder was forty-five and Hedy was twenty-seven. The day before their wedding, Hedy presented her betrothed with a bill for $350 ($4,800 today), half the cost of his dinners at her house the previous month, including half the cook’s salary. He was disconcerted at this sign that she meant to be financially independent but paid up.

It was a good marriage for a time, longer than most of Hedy’s marriages, his second and her third. With her dispute resolved with MGM she was working again more than full-time; her films from the war years include
White Cargo
with
Walter Pidgeon,
The Heavenly Body
with William Powell,
The Conspirators
with Paul Henreid, and
Experiment Perilous
with George Brent and Paul Lukas. In 1945, the year her daughter, Denise, was born, Hedy made
Her Highness and the Bellboy
with Robert Walker and June Allyson.

And all the while her Secret Communication System patent gathered dust somewhere in a Navy Department file cabinet, itself a secret, due to expire seventeen years out, in 1959, seemingly of no use to anyone.

[
TEN
]

O Pioneers!

A broad and fundamental patent now existed for a frequency-hopping radio system. It had been constructively reduced to practice. It belonged to the U.S. government. The U.S. Navy, which found no immediate use for it, had filed it away. Since it was classified secret, the government
denied its identifying information to those who had no need to know, including the names of the two unlikely patentees, Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil.

A consulting engineer at Hoffman Laboratories in Los Angeles remembered encountering this Secret Communication System patent in the mid-1950s, when it was passed to him as the basis for a U.S. Navy contract project. The consulting engineer was a Michigan-born descendant of Polish nobility named Romuald Ireneus Scibor-Marchocki, educated at Wayne State University and Caltech and twenty-eight years old in 1954. “
When we received the contract to develop the
Sonobuoy,” Scibor-Marchocki recalled in an online tribute, “we were provided with a copy of the H. Kiesler-Markey [
sic
] patent. Since it was dated a decade previously, we assumed that it was an existing secret technology, devised by some clever electrical engineer, working under a Navy contract and thus obligated to assign the patent to the Navy.”

Hoffman Laboratories manufactured military communication systems as well as consumer electronics. Scibor-Marchocki was handed the Secret Communication System patent because the Navy had contracted with Hoffman to build a jam-proof sonobuoy based on the technology, and Hoffman assigned him to design it. “Sonobuoy” is a portmanteau of the words “sonar” (sound navigation and ranging) and “buoy”; the device was to consist of a miniature sonar system built into a parachute-deployable buoy, intended to detect and locate an enemy submarine with sound waves and transmit the coordinates to a sub-chaser aircraft overhead.

In his tribute, Scibor-Marchocki reconstructs his work on the Hoffman sonobuoy:

As requested, we designed the radio communications following the concept of the [Markey-Antheil] patent.… To perform the frequency-hopping, we would have employed a cylinder (spool) with protrusions. Each frequency would have been assigned an individual follower [contact] riding in a row parallel to the axis of the cylinder. There would have been perhaps a dozen frequencies. How fast would the cylinder
rotate? … 90 rpm sounds about reasonable. Anything slower would compromise security. The Sonobuoy and the listening aircraft would employ the same [type of] spool. When the aircraft wanted to listen to a different Sonobuoy, it would have to change spools.

“
In retrospect,” Scibor-Marchocki adds, “I realize that the Navy asked us at Hoffman (and me in particular) to design a frequency-hopping radio system; because they considered that if anybody could, we would. Thus, rather than existing technology, this was intended to investigate a new (but neglected) concept.”

The sonobuoy that Scibor-Marchocki designed was a narrow cylinder like a length of pipe about two feet long that floated perpendicular to the water surface with a hydrophone suspended below it on a cable. It was meant to be dropped in multiples of at least three in a pattern that would allow the sub-chasing aircraft to triangulate the submarine’s location. It “
worked very well as a listening device,” Scibor-Marchocki writes, “and for either active or passive ranging of submarines, but it was not practical as a system.” It was impractical, among other reasons, because it drifted from its assigned position and was difficult to locate precisely in those days before GPS; its hydrophone was jostled excessively in rough seas; and the spinning frequency hopper aboard the sub-chaser plane required constant adjustment to stay in sync with the one in the sonobuoy. The system could have been improved, but the Navy came up with a system better suited to its purposes
of permanently anchored hydrophones connected to a shore station by cable.

That system, Scibor-Marchocki notes, “
solves each of the foregoing [sonobuoy] problems. Regrettably, without the necessity of radio communication, there was no more spread-spectrum involved. To this day, the Navy has hydrophones deployed along the whole coast of the USA.” (The broader and more general term “
spread spectrum” began to be substituted for “frequency hopping” in the early 1950s. Frequency hopping is a specific kind of spread spectrum; another kind, “direct sequence,” involves electronically or digitally spreading the signal across a wide bandwidth, making it largely indistinguishable from noise.)

Scibor-Marchocki’s testimony directly links the Markey-Antheil patent to a specific postwar technology, but a number of other developments in frequency-hopping military communications preceded Hoffman’s sonobuoy work. The high-level classification imposed on such work makes it impossible to determine if the engineers involved benefited directly from knowledge of Hedy’s idea of frequency hopping. What at least is clear is that none of that work preceded Hedy and George’s invention.

The University of Southern California electrical engineering professor Robert A. Scholtz examined the origins of spread-spectrum communications at length in a
paper published in 1982, just as the technology was becoming available for civilian development. He
told me he was aware of the Markey-Antheil patent, and a colleague, Robert Price,
interviewed Hedy for a
follow-up paper published in 1983. (“Lamarr and Antheil,” Price writes, “seem … to have been more than a score of years ahead of their time, considering that [frequency hopping] evidently was not used operationally against intentional jamming until [1963].”) Scholtz devotes several pages to a discussion of what he calls the “prehistory of SS communications,” most of which concerns the development of radar. None of these earlier developments constitute a complete frequency-hopping system such as Hedy and George’s.

Curiously, the most direct predecessor that Scholtz identifies to later spread-spectrum developments was a radio control system for a glide bomb developed during World War II not by Germany but by the U.S. Navy with support from the National Bureau of Standards. The parallel between German and U.S. glide-bomb work raises the interesting question of whether the Navy had learned of German glide-bomb development from the Oslo Report or some other espionage source. If so, it has never acknowledged a connection. “One of several secure radio guidance efforts,” Scholtz writes of the U.S. program, “took place at Colonial Radio, predecessor of the Sylvania division at Buffalo, NY. This project was under the direction of [the engineer] Madison Nicholson.”

Nicholson’s team had developed a limited two-hop frequency-hopping system, code-named Janus, to help foil possible jamming of the glide-bomb radio link.
“Although
the radio link was designed to be covert,” Scholtz notes, “the system could withstand jamming in one of its two frequency bands of operation and still maintain command control.” The Navy glide bomb that eventually emerged, code-named Bat, saw limited use in the Pacific theater late in the war, sinking several Japanese ships and destroying bridges and other targets in Burma.

An important postwar influence on spread-spectrum development was a
seminal paper by the mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published in the
Bell System Technical Journal
in 1948. In his paper, which has been called the founding document of information theory, Shannon showed that a wider spectrum—a wider channel—can carry a given quantity of information more reliably than a narrower channel. An English expert puts it another way. “
Shannon’s formula,” he writes, “indicates that a wide-band signal is more robust [than a narrow-band signal] when the channel is noisy and, of course, jamming is just another source of noise.” Another advantage of wider bandwidth compared with narrower, Shannon showed, is that the same volume of data can be sent with a less powerful transmitter. (Shannon
coined the term “bit” in his 1948 paper as well.)

In 1955, contemporary with Scibor-Marchocki’s sonobuoy work at Hoffman Laboratories, Madison Nicholson at Sylvania Buffalo initiated work on a radio communications system that Sylvania hoped would be selected for the new
nuclear submarines the Navy was developing. Known by the acronym BLADES, the system used frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FH-SS) to overcome the problem of multi-path distortion in long-range communications—that is, distortion caused by a signal bouncing off mountains and other radio-reflective surfaces and arriving at a receiver along several different paths at once.

After several years of testing and improvement, a prototype BLADES was delivered to the Navy in 1962. The prototype was installed on the
Mount McKinley
, the flagship of the Navy’s amphibious forces during the Cuban missile crisis that October. Scholtz writes that the radio system was “
evidently carried into the blockade associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis but was not tested there due to a radio silence order.” The
Mount McKinley
sailed from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean early in 1963. There, says Scholtz, “intentional jamming was encountered, and BLADES provided the only useful communication link for the
McKinley
. Thus, BLADES was quite likely the earliest FH-SS communication system to reach an operational state.”

Between 1945 and 1978, the U.S. military and national security agencies developed a number of
different secret communication systems based on various forms of spread spectrum. Among these were a secure radioteletype system for the U.S. Army; a remote-control system for the Corporal rocket; radio guidance systems for the Sergeant and Jupiter missiles, abandoned when inertial guidance was chosen
instead but transferred over to the U.S. Air Force’s Deep Space Program for telemetry, command, tracking, and ranging; the Phantom radio system developed by General Electric for the Air Force; the Martin Company’s RACEP system that provided secure mobile voice communications for up to seven hundred users; a similar system from Martin called Cherokee; Motorola’s MUTNS tactical navigation system; ITT’s SECRAL missile guidance system; and a half dozen others. In 1978, Scholtz notes, the U.S. National Security Agency declassified and allowed to proceed through the patenting process “
scores of patents including at least a dozen on SS techniques.”