I had never heard this story before. And it has been in my home for years!

Hedy was married to a German businessman, who had many Nazi clients. They openly discussed military topics quite freely in Hedy’s presence. After all, what would a female understand about such things?

Hedy absorbed everything she heard. She understood, and she saw the problems with the technology.

She did what any young woman would do under the circumstances in 1937 Germany. She drugged her maid, stole her clothes and fled to London. I don’t know how, but Louis B. Mayer, the famous head of MGM, offered her a contract. She subsequently became a Hollywood star known as Hedy Lamarr.

Time magazine called her ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ Her face appeared on posters and magazine covers, as you’d expect.

But her mind was far from the silver screen. She was thinking about the problems of technology that would be used in World War II.

She knew that radio-controlled torpedoes could be jammed by the enemy, making ships far less vulnerable.  But, she thought, what if the radio-controlled signals kept changing frequencies? What if it ‘hopped’ from one frequency to another that was unpredictable to the enemy? This was one mental dot.

Now, let’s identify another dot that Hedy joined together.

In 1940, Hedy began talking to a music composer at a party. They talked. First, about music; then, about technology; and finally, about synchronized player pianos. They could play in perfect time if they all used the same perforated paper rolls.

Joining the dots, Hedy wondered if the frequency of the notes could be used to synchronize radio-controlled torpedoes. The transmitters could switch between the pre-determined 88 notes or frequencies on the paper roll.

What would a clever female in America during a world war do next?

Along with her music-composing friend, she filed for and received a patent for a “Secret Communication System.” Then she did her patriotic duty for her adopted country and gave it to the United States Navy.

The Navy did its patriotic duty to itself and promptly rejected it. The inventor was ‘just an actress.’ The technology was ‘ahead of its time.’ Which is an impossibility, given it was a proven concept.

But the Navy did offer Hedy a job—selling war bonds. Was she successful? She was $25 million successful in the 1940s.

The patent expired in 1959. Forgotten and never used, until the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Navy used it on their ships that blockaded Cuba.

Please give this a bit of a think. What can we learn from all this? Never discredit a source of an idea, but consider it on its own merits. One person can make a difference. Bias towards anything can be the seed of its own destruction. What parallels can you think of that suffer from the ‘navy think’ described here?

I am curious about your thoughts. Please comment by sending me an email with your bit of a think.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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glenn.walmsley@icloud.com

Note: There is more to this story than space allows, but you can read how all this connects to the movie Blazing Saddles in my annual book compilation, where I write the backstory after each Blog about how the Blog came into being.