Herald Angel: Anja Drephal studied history, American studies, Japanese
studies in Berlin and Tokyo in Graz and also in Vienna and when I asked her she
said kind of everywhere. So, it's her third talk on a Chaos Communication
Congress. She was here three years ago and two years ago and we are very happy to
have her back - please welcome her! *applause*
Anja Drephal: Thank you! Oh I'm on - that's good! I would have taken that
screwdriver but - okay, it's too bad! Well, thank you all for being here I hope
you all having a good time so far. It's day three and I'm having a good time. It's
a very good Congress. This year unfortunately it's been hard for some
people to actually be here. It's been a nightmare to buy tickets online. So in
addition I'd like to welcome everybody watching a stream from at home or Congress
everywhere so thank you for watching! Anyone of you watching this from at home
or anyone of you who has some sort of cell phone mobile device connected to the
Congress Wi-Fi has actually been using spread spectrum technology in the past
couple days. But this is not a talk about spread-spectrum technology. Oh, and I
wanted to give a hint to the translations team - in German, that's
"Bandspreizverfahren" and... je suis desolé, je ne sais pas what it means in
French... So, this is not what I want to talk about because I would never pretend
to be an electrical engineer or a fully trained computer scientist who is
qualified to explain this very complex technology.
What I want to do is tell you a story, give you a short 20 minute overview of a
person, a remarkable person, who worked on the development of spread spectrum
technology about 75 years ago and until recently was not recognized for her
accomplishments. Let's say you are an electrical engineer or you are a computer
scientist and you want to learn about this technology. I try to avoid saying it
because it's such a tongue twister and I'm gonna stumble over the spread-spectrum.
So yeah, so you go to your library and you find lots of big handbooks, handbook on
spread-spectrum communication for example and there you usually you have sort of an
introduction with something like this never mind if you can't read it right now
I've uploaded my slides so you can look at it later and I'll also explain anything
that's important this is from an Austrian handbook and of course it mentions a
"Claude Shannon" in 1948 publishing a mathematical theory of communication, a
very important paper, and before that actually it mentions in 1942 "Markey" and
"Antheil" are patenting the first spread- spectrum system ever.
So you're wondering who is "Markey" and "Antheil"? Probably some guys at MIT,
right? Working for the military in 1942, developing secret weapons? It could be.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this is Markey.
Hedwig Kiesler born in 1914 in Vienna.
She was a beautiful child, she was 16 when she decided to quit school and become an
actress, she started hanging around the Sascha-Film studio in Vienna. She also
stalked famous director Max Reinhardt until he cast her in his play "The Weaker
Sex". She had a couple more minor roles, she played "Sissi", she played opposite
Heinz Rühmann, and it was - oopsie - it was Max Reinhardt who - promoting his play
- coined the phrase "Hedy Kiesler is the most beautiful woman in the world!" and
the press picked it up very quickly. Here she's again. Then when she was 18, she did
something very daring: she starred in Czech film called "Ecstasy". It's very
interesting, please ask me about it or watch it on YouTube. There was full
frontal nudity and she faked the first on- screen orgasm. The film was banned, the
Pope denounced it and Hedy became famous.
But then after "Ecstasy", surprisingly,
Hedy stopped acting and she married: this guy. She became the young trophy wife of
Fritz Mandl. He was - at that time - the third richest man in Austria. He was the
owner of the "Hirtenberger ammunitions factory", he was also an Austro-fascist,
he supplied weapons to a lot of unsavory individuals and organizations and - as his
beautiful young trophy wife - she was supposed to be there at parties, at
meetings with important industrialists, weapons dealers, politicians and to just
stand there and look beautiful. But she also listened when they spoke
about developments, about German glide bombs being tested and developed. She
listened and she noticed. After a couple of years, for whatever reason, I think
Mandl was pretty controlling and then jealous, for one reason or another, Hedy
left him and used her "Ecstasy"-fame to go to the US and get a contract at MGM in
1937. Her first film in the US was "Algiers" and this film established her
fame, her new look, her hairstyle and this very distant kind of unsmiling style that
MGM had in mind for her and they also promoted her as the most beautiful woman
in the world. Critics usually agreed that she could not act, but, oh my god, she's
so beautiful, who cares? She... actually, she was not just beautiful. She was also
bored with acting, because usually, working for a studio, you made like two
movies a year, which took a couple weeks, and the rest of the time, well, there was
no Netflix. So, she didn't like to party that much, she read, she painted and she
always invented little gadgets at home. And she also worried, of course, at that
time. She worried about the war going on in Europe. She had... She was an
immigrant, after all. She had friends and family still in Europe and, oh yeah, it's
just a couple of... that's Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and then she was Delilah in
"Samson and Delilah", Technicolor, yeah, anyway she worried. And that's a fun tweet
I found: "The feeling when you are 3,000 percent done with glam photo shoots and
are inwardly planning a new radio frequency system for torpedoes"
*laughter* I like it.
So that's what she started doing, because she remembered what she had picked up. She
knew about German bombs being controlled by radio, she knew that Germany was using
18 different frequencies for their glide bombs and usually dispatching 18 bombs at
a time so the enemy would have to jam every single frequency and at least one
would - you know - get through. So especially in 1914, when Germany
started sinking English ships in September 1940, 77 children who were being evacuated
to Canada died, she offered her knowledge about weapons to the Navy. She thought
about offering it, because she had an idea. These German glide bombs they were
radio-controlled. So why not make torpedoes with radio control to increase
their chances of hitting targets and not just going in a straight line and maybe
hitting something or not. Her second idea was to use just really really short
signals just split-second radio signals between the ship, the torpedo and a plane
overhead, in between longer intervals of radio silence. And then her idea was
changing the frequency of the split-second signal, making it harder to intercept and
jam. Let's check, she just said "Okay, let's just use a lot of frequencies and hop!".
She called it "frequency hopping". But of course, the question is: how to do that?
And here's where that second name
mentioned in the patent comes in. This is "George Antheil". He was from New Jersey.
In the 1920s, he moved to Berlin and then to Paris and became famous as an avant-
garde composer and pianist. There's another one...
His most famous composition was the "Ballet Mécanique" in 1924, where he tried
to synchronize 16 player pianos and he also used airplane propellers and
sirens... You can also watch it on the internet. Listen to, it's crazy! It was
the score for a movie, actually. So, he knew about synchronizing mechanical
instruments when he met Hedy in 1940 at one of those Hollywood parties.
And they started working together on their secret communication system, which they
proposed to the National Inventors Council in 1941. Ah, here he is. There's... The
tall one is Hedy and on the right is George and the woman in the striped dress
is George's wife. So their secret communication system suggested using 88
frequencies, because there are 88 keys on a piano (it was just a little in-joke) and
hopping between them, synchronizing the sender, the transmitter, and the receiver
and in addition using random signals on three extra frequencies to just make some
noise. So, you have 88 frequencies and you're hopping on some with the signal.
You're sending one signal there, one signal here, and then you're sending
random signals that don't mean anything and if the enemy actually manages to
intercept one of these frequencies, they would be like just one "blip" and it
wouldn't make any sense.
What I want to just quickly talk about is this.
So this is what they thought might happen.
Here's an American ship going there dispatching a torpedo that would usually
go here. Here's a German ship and it doesn't go in
a straight line because it's trying to evade the torpedo.
Here's plane and the plane is watching and messaging the ship that the torpedo needs
to change its course and the ship is messaging the torpedo "go left, go right,
go left, go right, go left", and then - boom.
For synchronization between the sender and the receiver they suggested using these
paper ribbons with punch holes just like in those mechanical pianos that Antheil
used to be familiar with.
Oh here's actually a notebook that they used for the
mechanism that was supposed to make the sender and the receiver go off at the same
time, so they would be synchronized. The New York Times picked it up and - like
they said - the National Inventors Council actually was positive, liked the idea and
suggested that they should patent this. The US patents office awarded them the
patent but the Navy rejected it, eventually. The Navy said it's too bulky,
it's too big, we can't make this. But the question is: Why?
The Navy actually thought because they had said they wanted to use these paper
ribbons just like in a piano and they were like: "We can't put a piano in a torpedo,
are you crazy? It's not gonna work!" In fact it would have been much smaller, of
course. And then there was the issue of a Hollywood star, known for her beautiful
face and a crazy composer inventing a weapon system? I don't think so.
Then again the timing was kind of bad right after Pearl Harbor the Navy was in
shock and busy fixing their existing torpedo system. Because in 1942 about 60%
of American torpedoes were duds. They exploded too soon, they didn't explode at
all, they went anywhere and so the Navy was like "Okay, we got to fix this and we
can't really develop anything new right now." And then one point that I've been
thinking about is Hedy at that point was still technically an enemy alien.
She wasn't naturalized until 1953. So there's obviously always the question of loyalty,
I think. Instead, she was... it was suggested that
she should help the war by selling war bonds, which she did very successfully.
She sold seven million of... seven million dollars of war bonds in one day which is
in today's money about 100 million dollars.
She also served cake at the famous Hollywood Canteen.
But her patent seemed to have been forgotten.
It ran out in 1959. She never got anything from it.
She never got any financial gain. Nothing.
But in fact, there was secret military research on this topic.
From the 1940s until the 1970s, it was classified.
The first time spread-spectrum technology was used by the military was in 1962,
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A system called "BLADES" was installed in ships in
the Caribbean and later also in the Mediterranean Sea. And this system using
frequency-hopping spread-spectrum was the only one that could not be jammed at that point.
Civil use of this technology came much
much later in the 1970s, 1980s when the FCC started with a deregulation of
frequencies and allowed civil use of various frequencies in... let's say
microwaves, later mobile phones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc., etc., it actually
started being used in the civil sector. In the early 1990s Dave Hughes, who is
known as an internet pioneer, came across Hedy, researched her patent and lobbied
for her recognition for the first time.
He got her nominated for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, which she was awarded in 1997. She was 82 years
old, she didn't leave the house anymore. Her son went there and got that award on
her behalf and supposedly she was very happy about it that she finally got some
recognition. In the past 10 years especially in Austria
there has been at last more recognition of Hedy. There was an exhibition around the
country. The Austrian Republic awards the Hedy Lamarr award for achievements by
women in information technology. And Vienna named a street after Hedy. Her
birthday is now "Inventor's Day". In the United States she was finally inducted in
the National Inventor's Hall of Fame two years ago.
Well, I've been trying to speak just 20 minutes giving you an overview of this - I
think remarkable - person who should get much more recognition than she did.
I think I've been a bit faster, actually - that's good. I'm hoping that maybe I've
been able to inspire some interest in this person and maybe inspire as someone to
read up on her or maybe watch her movies. Sadly, she's been all but forgotten.
Her career was... was big and very short. And then she lived on for decades, she was
forgotten, her inventions were forgotten. So, I'm hoping that maybe you'd like to
look at some sources, watch the movies you could contact me. I have some... some
really good books that I read on her that I would recommend. And that would be good.
That would... That would make me very happy, because doing research on Hedy was fun.
It kind of you kind of develop a relationship to a person like that and I like her.
She was she was considered difficult, as a woman, as an actor,
but I think she was considered difficult for doing things that any man would have been considered:
"Yeah, he's a strong guy and he knows what he wants and he does what he wants!"
She was always doing things her own way.
She came to America on her own, alone.
She made her way. She was... She was basically, you could say, she was a refugee.
I mean, she came with a contract,
but she couldn't go back. Austria was gone, there was war. She always missed it
and she had to make her own way. She had to fight for a place in life and she
always tried to find happiness. Unfortunately, she didn't really find it.
And so, in closing, before, we can have a couple minutes for questions, I hope.
I'd like to ask you to give a hand to Hedy.
*applause*
Herald Angel: Thanks a lot, Anya, for this
very nice talk. We have a couple of minutes for questions and answers, so if
you have something that you would like to know, please feel free to go to the mics.
There's something going on online I think.
AD: Okay
Questioner: Yes thank you. I would like to know, are there any compatible stories,
where non-technical people / persons contributed to technology.
AD: I'm not sure
Q: Is there another Hedy?
AD: Oh another Hedy... I'm pretty sure
there is. I can't come up with any example right now, but... maybe someone does.
Because there are so many people, especially women, who are being overlooked
for what they're doing like she was. I'm sorry, I can't really come up with any
examples right now. But especially when it comes to women, it's still, sadly, it's
still so hard for women, to be recognized in a technological field like a man would.
This always... Maybe especially when you're this pretty. Nobody thinks that
there's anything behind this pretty face and I know, I would... like, if anyone has
an example that would be great? I'm sure there's a lot of people who are another Hedy.
HA: I think the person on microphone 2 was nodding to that, but you have a question
there right?
Mic 2: Yeah, that actually kind of covered my question. But I just... first of all
wanted to thank you so much for doing this talk and also maybe to sort of respond to
you. I think, one of the things we could think about is not only women but also
people particularly in what we still call "The Global South" who are doing amazing
work that doesn't get recognized and - you know - we come to conferences and there's
oftentimes not a lot of communication between developers in those places. So I
think it's very likely that's where our next Hedy Lamarr could come from.
AD: Probably.
Mic 2: So that being said I do have a
question for you. Which is: What can everybody here do to try to help avoid
this? How can we think outside the box and be reaching out
to people and maybe uncovering hidden work and sort of breaking the mold? Because
that's what happened to her like, she got stuck in this structure that existed.
AD: By thinking outside the box I think.
By supporting - not just girls - from an early age, you know? To just not look at
this gender stereotypes. You have a girl and so "Yeah, she can't be interested in
technology." You should just be open and be open to anyone who's asking questions,
who wants to learn and support that.
Mic 2: It's really awesome to see so many little girls here - yeah, thanks to all
the parents who are doing that.
*applause*
HA: We have one more question online.
Q: Yes thank you. Can you elaborate a little bit on her formal education?
Was there anything else than Normal School?
AD: Yes. Well, she was born in 1914. She went... Typically a girl of her status,
she was from a well-off family, her dad was a banker, went to a girl's school,
which she did. But as far as I've read up, her dad actually supported her learning.
He taught her a lot, he took her hiking, he told her how technical apparatuses work
and he always supported her learning a lot.
But then again, she had the typical formal education of a girl of her age and status.
And when she was 16, she was at a finishing school in Switzerland and she
ran away, because she wanted to be an actress. So I guess, it was not that challenging.
it was nothing that really interested her in that school.
I'm guessing, girls they learned how to be a good wife.
How to, you know, know enough so that you're not too boring for your future husband.
That was the goal of educating girls.
HA: We got another question on Mic 1.
Mic 1: I would like to thank you for this
talk as well and for the intervention just on microphone number 2. I would like to
know what led you to researching Hedy's life and how did you stumble upon this
personality? Because as you said yourself it's hard to, I mean, they're not
recognized - how how do you find her at all? Thank you.
AD: So, how did I find her? I found her
last year. I had never ever heard of her. Never seen any of her movies. Somebody on
Twitter, who I follow, posted a link about her. Like an article online about her
inventions. And I read that and I thought "Wow... That's interesting! Who is that?"
And then I just started googling her and in the end I started buying all these
books and reading and watching her movies and I'm really happy about that because,
as I said, I really like her. So, yeah, Twitter.
HA: , I think... There's someone at Mic 6. Yeah, I
wasn't sure because you sat down again... So please, ask your question now.
Mic 6: I'm not sure, you said like, the
name of the talk was "The Woman Behind Wi- Fi" - can you explain the title and her
position and what was made out of her theory?
AD: Yes, I chose that title, because a lot
of articles... there's a lot of short mentions of her online and they often
stressed that she was one of the pioneers of these technologies that eventually led
to today's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And there's still always this discussion, when
somebody says well yeah she invented Wi-Fi (which I wouldn't say, because she didn't)
but she was one of many pioneers working on this technology the past decades and
there's still always kind of misogynistic backlash when somebody recognizes her
achievement. Then people are always "Yeah, it's so different Wi-Fi and spread-
spectrum today from what she did and she didn't really do anything, it's not that
important!" and that's still today. And I think it is important, what she did. She
was ahead of her time. She thought about something that scientists during that time
could not grasp. It was possible her patent was feasible and it's - to answer
your question - it's kind of a little provocative, maybe, the title.
Intentionally to just make you think about "What exactly did she do?". Which is not
that little, I think.
HA: I think regardless of a provocative title it was a really amazing talk and we
would like to thank you one more time, Anja Drephal
*applause*
*music*