- Hedy Lamarr!
from wikipedia:
Avant garde composer George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mecanique, originally written for Fernand Léger’s 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.
Together, Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and “Hedy Kiesler Markey”, Lamarr’s married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
The idea was ahead of its time, and not feasible owing to the state of mechanical technology in 1942. It was not implemented in the USA until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution. In 1998, Ottawa wireless technology developer Wi-LAN, Inc. “acquired a 49 percent claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock” (Eliza Schmidkunz, Inside GNSS); Antheil had died in 1959.
Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Similar patents had been granted to others earlier, such as in Germany in 1935 to Telefunken engineers Paul Kotowski and Kurt Dannehl who also received U.S. Patent 2,158,662 and U.S. Patent 2,211,132 in 1939 and 1940. Blackwell, Martin and Vernam’s Secrecy Communication System patent from 1920 (1598673) does seem to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil’s patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.
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Are you sure that’s not Vivien Leigh?
Vivien had a more heart-shaped face. But they did have somewhat similar features.
I think Vivien Leigh had more delicate features, more like a fine bone china. Hedy Lamarr doesn’t look nearly as fragile as I’ve always thought VL did.
And I can’t imagine VL holding a whip like that. =)
I never noticed any resemblance between the two until now and I got scared for a minute, thinking I’d posted the wrong picture, but yeah, that’s definitely Hedy Lamarr.
You can’t see it in this shot, but Hedy’s upper lip is much fuller than Vivien’s (which was quite thin – she had the sexiest pout!) Also, the natural shape of Hedy’s mouth was more downward-curving than Vivien’s.
I’ll have to pay more attention to these things! =)
I have spent many hours examining photos of the great actresses of the 1930s & ’40s. =)
It’s a shame that the studio photographers tended to make so many of their subjects look the same (Lombard/Dietrich, Leigh/Lamarr) – when they should have been focusing on their individual beauty. Probably some studio exec. wanting cookie-cutter “types.”
Yeah, I suppose you’re right and now that you mention it, I’m sure the similarities will become more obvious to me. I never noticed any similarity between Dietrich and Lombard, but I’m not a huge Marlene fan (Suzanne Vega’s song notwithstanding) to begin with. =)
Dietrich & Lombard looked very different in real life – http://carolelombard.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=0 – but many of their studio portraits (especially early in Carole’s career) have very similar poses, makeup & lighting – so that sometimes I have difficulty telling them apart. (If you want to see Carole looking most like Carole – look for shots from the Venice Pier party (such as the one I linked.)
Oops – I forgot a closing parenthesis. Here it is.)
You’re so funny. Doesn’t it drive you mad when people don’t close their parentheses? It does me (though not in this case because of your clever way to close them). =D
Is that *really* Claudette Colbert? I’m glad her name was listed, I would have never known it was her:
http://carolelombard.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=1
Yup – that’s Claudette! Must have been some party. From the book, “Gable & Lombard”:
“For her most famous party, Lombard hired the fun house at the Venice Amusement Pier and invited everyone she could think of, from stars and studio heads to messenger boys and cleaning women, urging them all to come in old clothes so there’d be no class distinctions. Some of Hollywood’s snobbier personalities declined her invitation when they discovered they’d be mingling with grips, cameramen and others lower down the studio social scale.”
That’s by Warren G. Harris, by the way. Copyright 1974.
That’s particularly awesome, that she would throw a party like that. I love her even more now!!