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- Austrian-American Inventor and Film Star: Hedy Lamarr
- The First Binary Digital Computer: Konrad Zuse and the Z1
An Austrian-American Invention:
Spread Spectrum or “Frequency Hopping”
It’s almost too bizarre a script for Hollywood! In the 1940s, an Austrian emigré Hollywood glamour girl helps the US war effort by inventing a radio-control device for torpedoes that is immune to jamming. Her co-inventor is an avant-garde opera composer she meets at a Tinseltown dinner party, who suggests using the principle of a slotted player piano roll for the encoding program. The two patent their invention and live happily ever after.
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American composer George Antheil, who spent much of his career in Europe, would later help Hedy Lamarr come up with the idea for an anti-jamming radio device based on the 88 keys of a piano. (Photo courtesy Chris Baumont's George Antheil site.) |
The Lamarr-Antheil patent expired after 17 years and was not renewed, but all later patents for spread spectrum technology acknowledge the original. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil ever received a dime for their technology, which was classified by the government until 1985, when the FCC made it available for limited use. Today the technology is promising improved cellular telephone use and increased telecommunications security, although there is already debate about how secure the technolgy will be in the long run, once it is more widespread.
In any event, the story of the Lamarr-Antheil patent is one of the more interesting legends of scientific invention that has even been told in “Frequency Hopping,” a 2008 multimedia stage version of the story written and directed by Elyse Singer. At the 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan, Erica Newhouse and Joseph Urla played Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil inventing military technology. The production also featured some of Antheil’s avant-garde music in “Ballet Mécanique,” which he wrote in Paris in his mid-20s.
MORE > Hedy Lamarr
The First Binary Digital Computer:
Konrad Zuse and the Z1
Years before the room-sized ENIAC computer in the US, Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) was working on his mechanical Z1 binary digital computer in Berlin in 1938. In the years between 1938 and 1945, Zuse and his colleagues, using an electro-mechanical concept, designed and built what are now considered to be the world’s first functioning binary digital computers—the Z2 through the Z4. The Z2 was completed in 1940, the Z3 appeared the next year. In April 1945 the new Z4 had to be moved away from bomb-riddled Berlin. Ordered by the Ministry of Aviation to take the device to underground facilities in the Harz mountains, Zuse and his team were shocked to discover the terrible conditions under which the V1 and V2 rockets were being built. But with the help of Wernher von Braun’s staff, they managed to move the Z4 south, to the Alpine village of Hinterstein in the Allgäu. After the war, the Z4 was set up and running at the Technical University in Zurich. Zuse KG, the inventor’s own computer firm, was founded in 1949. Siemens AG bought Zuse out in 1956.
Today Zuse’s Z4 machine is on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Although it is no longer in operating condition, the Z4 was the only one of Zuse’s binary devices to survive the war. A reproduction of his Z1 can be seen at Berlin’s German Technology Museum (Deutsches Technikmuseum).
MORE > Hedy Lamarr
MORE > Famous Germans
CONTENTS > FAMOUS PEOPLE > TECH UPDATE
Related Pages
- Hedy Lamarr was much more than just a beauty. She had brains, too!
- The Lamarr-Antheil patent from Chris Beaumont
- Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin and the Konrad Zuse Year (2010). Also in German.
- Konrad Zuse is a site by the inventor's son, Hort Zuse (in English and German).
- Konrad Zuse - English information about Zuse and his computers. Photos of Zuse's art work. Photos of the Z3 computer.
- Zuse-Jahr 2010 - Konrad Zuse would have been 100 years old on June 22, 2010 (site in German).
- Famous Germans, Austrians and Swiss
- Famous Graves - The graves and cemeteries of the famous
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