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To: CAtechTrader who wrote (63094)	1/19/2000 3:44:00 PM
From: Manx	Respond to of 152472

Wednesday January 19 3:01 PM ET Actress Lamarr Also Was an Inventor ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - Hedy Lamarr, the inventor. Sounds improbable, but the sexy star shared a U.S. patent for technology that became an important part of the communications industry decades later. The Electronic Frontier Foundation honored Lamarr in 1997 for her role in the creation of ``spread spectrum' technology that helps maintain the security of military communications and many cellular phones. It was during World War II that the Austrian-born Lamarr, then at the height of her stardom, and a friend, musician George Antheil, created the concept. The world didn't know it, but she was a born tinkerer. And she had learned a lot about munitions from her first husband, Austrian armament manufacturer Fritz Mandl, whom she left before she came to Hollywood in 1937. She'd sat with Mandl as he reviewed films of field tests on radio-controlled torpedo systems. After the war broke out, she became interested in ways to circumvent the jamming that kept her new homeland, the United States, from using radio-controlled missiles against the Germans. As one of her sons, Anthony Loder, recounted it, she and Antheil ``were sitting at the piano one day and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said `Hey, look, we're talking to each other and we're changing all the time.' Fired up with the possibilities, they set to work the next day. ``We were sitting on the floor figuring the whole thing out,' she recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. A simple radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to block. But what if the signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals? Anyone trying to listen in or jam it would hear only random noise, like a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver were hopping in synch, the message would come through loud and clear, Lamarr realized. Antheil, whose avant garde musical compositions had featured up to 14 player pianos playing simultaneously, suggested using piano rolls to synchronize the torpedo and its controller. Their patent for a ``Secret Communication System' was granted on Aug. 11, 1942. The Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clockwork mechanism controlled by paper tape too cumbersome. It would take 20 years, and the invention of the transistor, for the concept to be realized. Three years after the patent expired, the idea was used in secure military communication systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962. But it was with the widespread availability of fast, cheap computer chips that spread spectrum really came into its own. It's still used by the military, including the U.S.'s Milstar defense communications satellite system, as well as for wireless Internet transmission and in many of the newer cellular phones. Neither she nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the commercialization of their patent, though it is cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology. ``I read the patent,' said Franklin Antonio, chief technical officer of the cellular phone maker Qualcomm Inc (NasdaqNM:QCOM - news). of San Diego. ``You don't usually think of movie stars having brains, but she sure did.'