Hello Friend,

     Today marks what would have been the 101st birthday of an actress who passed away on January 19, 2000.

Hedy Lamarr was not only a beautiful  leading lady, and actress in Hollywood movies,
she was also unfortunately married to a very controlling, Austrian arms merchant.

    The offshoot of that marriage is that she often attended business conferences and meetings with her
husband where military technology was discussed with scientists and other professionals.

Having a latent interest in science, she paid attention to what was being said.

      She managed to escape from her husband, and ended up in America and ended a meeting film tycoon,
Louis B. Mayer, which got her into the  Hollywood studios.

Now here is where the story gets interesting:

      Lamarr knew that radio controlled torpedoes could easily be jammed by broadcasting intereference
signals at the same frequency, thus causing the torpedo to go off course.  She had learn't something about
torpedoes from the meetings in her previous marriage.

   A friend and neighbour of hers, George Antheil who was a composer, and Lamarr decided to focus
their efforts on countering torpedoes.

They eventually figured out how to do frequency hopping,  which would prevent signal jamming by the
enemy.

This was actually achieved by using a piano roll of 88 frequencies. (composed of the 88 keys on a piano keyboard).

No way the enemy could block all those frequencies at the same time.

 For this Lamarr was awarded a US patent.

A great contribution  to the allied war effort, however the US navy did not adopt it. until 1962 when it was
used during the Cuba blockade.

     This also laid the foundation for what we currently use in bluetooth, GPS and wifi connections today.

Also used in many amateur telescopes today, just like this Meade instruments  telescope here:

http://khanscope.com/productdetails.cfm?productID=3525

Which happens to include a real value $1070 FREE Bonus accessory kit. (yes genuine value, not some
made up number)

Clear Skies,


Ray Khan

PS Google pays tribute to Hedy Lamarr today with a google doodle, in her honour.