- Correction:
海蒂.拉玛 only invest FH-CDMA, now our 手机 uses DS-CDMA. FH-CDMA is used in military. Of course FH-CDMA has some influence on the our current 手机, but not all.
"Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid." -- Hedy Lamarr
The Beauty and the Brain
edwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna about half a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Later known as the screen star Hedy Lamarr, the clever Austrian would play an interesting off-screen role as an inventor in the Second World War — on the side of her adopted US homeland. This is just one of many facts that make Lamarr's biography quite unlike that of most film stars.
While she shocked European society and gained notoriety with her 10-minute nude swimming scene in the 1933 Austrian-Czech film Ecstasy (Extase, Buy the DVD), still appearing in the credits as Hedy Kiesler, she is perhaps best known today because of the Mel Brooks Western parody, Blazing Saddles (1973). Brooks used the running gag of a villainous character named “Hedley Lamarr” (Harvey Korman) who had to constantly correct people who kept calling him “Hedy.” (It was in that same classic film that Madeline Kahn masterfully portrayed a lisping spoof of Marlene Dietrich.) But such superficial recognition does an injustice to the attractive and highly intelligent Lamarr, who made her last film in 1958.
Hedy Gets Even
Hedy Lamarr appeared in the most unexpected places in the '90s! But the question arises: Did Hedy get a dime from Corel for her "Image is Everything" in this ad and on the product package? Well, not until she sued the Corel corporation for $250,000 - and won.
Hedy Lamarr got her marquee name from MGM's Louis B. Mayer, in remembrance of the beautiful silent-film star Barbara La Marr (born Rheatha Watson in 1896), who had died of a drug overdose in 1926. Mayer's renaming of his new star was also intended to erase any last traces of the Ecstasy scandal. After all, the film had been banned in America. Her new name was so unfamiliar to her that Lamarr misspelled it when she first arrived in Hollywood in 1937 and signed the hotel register at the famous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard (“Bills to be sent to Louis B. Mayer at MGM.”).
At Mayer's invitation, Lamarr had come to Hollywood from exile in London. She had recently divorced her domineering, pro-Nazi husband and literally escaped from Austria, leaving behind a blossoming Austrian-German film career. Mayer's plans to turn this advocate of unclothed beauty into family entertainment (“We make clean pictures.”) would not be entirely successful.
Six Husbands and a Patent
Austrian industrialist Fritz Mandl became Lamarr's first husband in 1933 when she was barely twenty. Notable for his unsuccessful attempt to buy up all existing prints of his wife's bare Ecstasy appearance, Mandl was also the first in a long chain of Lamarr divorces. The former banker's daughter later became a regular customer of Nevada's six-week divorce mill in Reno, a trend that ran through husband number six. But if she was a poor judge of spouses, she compensated for that as a famous glamour queen of the 1930s and '40s, dubbed immodestly by Mayer again as “the most beautiful girl in the world.”
But surely one of the most fascinating chapters in Lamarr's life and career had nothing to do with her film career and everything to do with her brain power. How many movie stars can you name, who hold the patent on a significant technological breakthrough? It's a story even Hollywood couldn't have invented. Hedy Lamarr shares the title to a 1942 patent, under her then legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey, for a “secret communication system” intended for use as a radio guidance device for US Navy torpedoes. Along with her co-inventor and avant-garde musician George Antheil (1900-1959), Lamarr came up with the idea of “frequency hopping” to quickly shift the radio signals of control devices, making them invulnerable to radio interference or jamming, a feat of technological prowess that was only formally acknowledged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in March 1997 — somewhat belatedly for Mr. Antheil, who died in 1959. But for the 83-year-old Lamarr, then a Florida retiree, “It was about time.”
maya wrote:
海蒂.拉玛是奧地利银行家的女儿，在1930年代至40年代被誉为“世界上最美丽的女人”。因1932年主演史上第一部两点全露的电影Ecstasy而全球闻名。1966年出版争议性自传，为暴露个人情欲隐私之第一人。自此消失于影坛。除此之外，拉玛还是个贡献卓著的通讯发明家，手机的原理就是她发明的！拉玛逝于2000年1月19日。
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