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.