Hedy Lamarr (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Hedy Lamarr (2018)

womenshistory.org

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The submitted title ("An Austrian-American actress/inventor pioneered basis for WiFi, GPS, & Bluetooth") was highly editorialized, which breaks the HN guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Submitters: please don't do that. It skews discussion in unhelpful ways—and particularly did so in this case. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Hedy's Folly, by Richard Rhodes. It's a very good book about Hedy Lamar's life and her fame, and work on that patent. It's interesting that the book is not mentioned. The author is the same one that wrote the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I believe the movie Oppenheimer, was based on. All of his books are very interesting, revealing many of the intricacies, that took place in recent history, making the world we live in today.

Oppenheimer was based on “American Prometheus”, thus all the Prometheus references.

True - but Richard Rhodes (author of Hedys Folley) was an advisor to Nolan for the film and I imagine his books on atomic history were very helpful.

Frequency hopping is no small idea to crack because you either need a shared codebook (PRNG) or a means of re-keying to an ephemeral window of future sequences. Didn't read Lamarr's patent but she seems a natural hacker girl taking music boxes apart aged 5.

Just a hacker huh? Is a female hacker different than a male one?

TIL Kleiner's pet headcrab in HL2 is named after an inventor. I don't much care for the "great man" (great woman in this case) view of history, but this is a good story.

She surely was a brilliant mind, but calling her "the mother of Wi-Fi" is IMO a bit disingenuous, it is like calling Becquerel "the father of the nuclear reactor" because he accidentally discovered spontaneous radioactivity.

cannot edit anymore, but after reading dang's comment, I wish to emphatise that "mother of the Wi-Fi" is a reference to the article content and not the title.

Specifically

Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Also, @dang, it's fascinating that a streak of downvotes on a recent comment percolated on these two comments with the same exact magnitude and at the same time, on a thread that has no more traction.

how interesting...

especially this one, I see no reason why it went from +2 to 0 at the same time that the parent went from +7 to +5 since it doesn't say anything controversial or offensive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636480

It would be great if people could se who downvoted them

Even though I had stumbled/read about Hedy Lamarr earlier, the book "How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World"[1] by Steven Johnson was the one that got me to read it in detail. The book is exciting and would definitely be one of my casual reading suggestions.

1. https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633...

Weird choices. Clean water is not really on par with the phonograph.

Wlan is not using frequency hopping or am I mistaken?

Yes, otherwise interference would be a right pain (or render it unusable completely). This happens for many wireless systems (like bluetooth too).

Bluetooth uses frequency hopping. WiFi and GPS do not.

No, but an early wireless midpoint between nascent wifi deployments and really shitty WAP in a world before data over cellular networks was Ricochet Networks. Frequency hopping over the public bands of the era (900MHz mostly I think) it was able to give decent wireless internet in the mid 90s to those of us living in supported areas of Silicon Valley. When laptops were a new thing and public wifi still years away it was fun ‘work remote’ in some corner of a coffeeshop when everyone else was chained to office desktops.

Unfortunately, mother of a shitty predecessor of wifi doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

It was, briefly. Long before Wi-Fi was a household name when 802.11 (no b) was just standardized for industrial use there was an FHSS PHY. I think Proxim or one of the other defunct industrial data capture companies sold it into the 2000s.

In any case there’s a lot of overlapping commonality in the information theory and engineering of frequency hopping and more modern SS.

The story of Hedy Lamar was an amazing piece of hacker lore to discover before the web when culture was mostly confined to paper and scarce. I often think makers form a parallel culture with its own thread of history. Hacker history like this shows that breakthrough technology is the effect of individual minds and desire.

Like many stories of this kind, the idea that this person "pioneered the basis" of these technologies seems massively overblown. What she and Antheil patented was a system that used frequency hopping to help guide torpedoes, using a piano roll to switch between the frequencies. They did not "invent" frequency hopping, which had been discussed in the literature for 30 years already.

But a piano-roll (presumably of type she discovered in music boxes) is quite ingenious solution for synchronised key sequences, for the technology of the time. Kinda similar analogical transfer going on for the Jacquard loom as early "program storage".

I don't think OP says that her work was not smart or non-innovative, merely that presenting it as “pioneering frequency hoping” is over the top.

E.g. Hoare did a lot of smart things with Rust bringing real-world impact, still you wouldn't write on his epitaph that he “pioneered programming languages”.

exactly. every single one of these cases is an absolute stretch and diminishes the work of the people who actually developed it. its historical revisionism at best

at worst its offensive to the person because it suggests they were so small minded that they didn't or couldn't actually develop the technology to a sufficient enough degree such that they are actually associated with it. these people are hidden not because they're women, but because they didn't really contribute anything at all to the field

And the spread spectrum as used in modern devices is not frequency hopping.

Could you explain what it is, then, and how it differs from frequency hopping?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Qbc_inIc

Yes, this is one of my favorite articles discussing the early patents dealing with frequency hopping and spread spectrum.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...

Looking at the early Wikipedia pages is fairly telling. From the first day that her page is up, Hedy Lamarr had a large section devoted to this invention[1]. But her co-inventor's Wikipedia only made a brief mention of it for the first several years[2]. It seems clear that people were interested in exaggerating her contributions in particular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&ol...

Note that this "Austrian-American actress" (I understand the helpful wording is aimed at non-buffs who may not recognise the name Hedy Lamarr) was a huge star in her day, an equivalent to - say - Margot Robbie.

Bigger than Robbie, much bigger

Yeah, I know more about Hedy Lamarr than I do about Margot Robbie even though she was at the peak of her career 40 years before I was born.

Got her own joke name in Blazing Saddles. No greater honour.

And, in her gratitude, sued Mel Brooks for $10m!

"What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You'll be able to sue her!"

Did she really? That's pretty hilarious tbh...

She did indeed. Brooks didn't even fight it. He just paid because he admired her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEQ3OxYL2Co

She actually sued us for using Hedley Lamarr. Too close to Hedy. And they said, ‘This is ridiculous, we’ll go to court, we’ll fight it.’ And I said, ‘No! She’s beautiful. See if you can get a meeting.’”

Brooks continued, “I read something about, you know, department store, embarrassment. ‘Give her within reason, pay her. Give her whatever she needs.’ ’You know, because, she’s given us so much wonderful cinematic pleasure for forty years. I think it’s incumbent on us to salute her is some, anyway we can. And send her my love and tell her where I live.’”

And a reference in Half-Life 2, of course

She is also the vector drawn face from the old CorelDraw marketing. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/791226228268901432/

Mel Brooks explains how he came up with "Hedley" Lamarr

https://youtu.be/ZEQ3OxYL2Co

Wow, I'm old. I know who Hedy is, had to look up Margot Robbie.

Serious question, how is she “-American”, she lived and worked in the States in the later part of her life, but her roots aren’t American?

She became a US citizen in 1953. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

She got US citizenship, this doesn’t/shouldn’t make her an Austrian-American actress since that implies that she has American roots.

You're entitled to your opinion, but the use of the "-American" suffix here is consistent with how it is often used for immigrants, e.g. a Chinese person who immigrates to the US could be described as Chinese-American. Or just American. The demonym can reflect both ethnicity and citizenship. Identity is complicated.

Moreover, I don't even know what you mean by "roots." The US is a country of immigrants. What qualifies as having "American roots" in your view?

I mean might be wrong to ask this question in a US based forum as you’re mostly going to be biased, but the reality is she is an Austrian that lived in the US. I feel like the hyphen changes her identity which she might not have agreed with.

Well you used a word that is crucial imho, roots, means where you come from, origins. I feel like I tend to have libertarian views regarding choosing your identity, which includes calling yourself American, Austrian or whatever, ultimately it’s you that should make this decision. But just adding hyphens to people with historical significance that decided to move to a country that at the time gave them an economic incentive by having the best market feels dirty. Especially considering that most other countries don’t do this.

So in your view, you're qualified to tell us Hedy's preferred demonym, but Wikipedia is not?

Where did I do that? I asked how is she -American in my OP.

> I feel like the hyphen changes her identity which she might not have agreed with.

Emphasis mine.

Sure sounds like you're speaking on behalf of Hedy.

This is a forum and I’ve brought this up as a topic for conversation, I’m expressing my opinion. It’s a normal use of a forum.

And also, it sounds nothing like I’m doing that. “I feel” and “might not” are definitely signs that I’m not claiming anything just discussing the topic.

You think that she became an American citizen and referred to herself as an American actress but didn’t think of herself as an American? The part we’re adding to how she described herself is Austrian, not American.

Sources please, I’m genuinely curious.

Calling someone X-American implies that they are a citizen or permanent resident of the United States, which she was.

If someone has three citizenships, what then?

Great question. If a person has three citizenships, then they have three citizenships.

She lived in the US for over 60 years.

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