If you’ve ever used Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or gotten driving directions from Google Maps, take a moment to say thanks to Hedy Lamarr.
The Austrian-American actress, who was once called the “most beautiful woman in the world,” was born in Austria in 1914, and made her way to Hollywood in 1937, where she starred in highly acclaimed films such as Algiers (1938), The Strange Woman (1946) and Samson and Delilah (1949).
Beyond being an actress, though, Lamarr was a pioneering inventor. She was disinterested in partying and socializing with Hollywood’s gentry, so she spent her nights tinkering, building, and experimenting in her workshop. Her inventions ranged from a tablet that could dissolve in water and transform it into a soda drink, to a new and improved design for traffic lights.
By far her most consequential invention, though, was sparked by her desire to help America win a terrible war. Lamarr was of Jewish descent, and she was horrified by the news that was coming home from World War II. She desperately wanted to help the Allied Forces defeat the Nazis, so she focused her creative energy on things that might give the Allies the upper hand.
One of the Allied Forces’ biggest problems was that their technology for guiding torpedoes was easily thwarted by the Nazis. At the time, German U-boats could evade Allied torpedoes by simply jamming the single radio frequency they used for guidance. So, to remedy this issue, Lamarr devised an ingenious solution: frequency hopping.
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed. But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is,” historian Richard Rhodes told NPR in 2011. “If they try to jam one particular frequency, it might hit that frequency on one of its hops, but it would only be there for a fraction of a second.”
The tricky part, of course, was that those shifting frequencies had to take place in perfect time synchronization with the radio transmitter guiding the torpedo, otherwise it would fail and the torpedo would go off track shortly after it was fired.
Lamarr managed to overcome this challenge with the help of composer and inventor George Antheil. With Lamarr’s technical prowess and Antheil’s mechanical skills, they built a contraption that worked much like a mechanical player-piano roll to keep a torpedo and the transmitter on the ship synchronized as they simultaneously jumped from one frequency to another. The duo was granted a patent for their invention in 1942.
Lamarr’s invention was never utilized by the U.S. Navy during World War II, but it was used for radio transmissions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. More importantly, though, frequency hopping laid the foundations for a broad range of radio communications technologies that we use today.
Today, frequency hopping is used for the Bluetooth technology that we find in countless devices, and was also used in early forms of Wi-Fi, and it laid the foundation for the GPS you use on your smartphone on a regular basis. The world wouldn’t be quite the same without Lamarr’s inventive mind.
Unfortunately, many don’t know about Lamarr’s contributions to modern technology and her efforts to help the Allied Forces win World War II because she’s primarily known as an actress. She didn’t get the recognition she deserved for these accomplishments in her time, and she’s still not given a lot of recognition for this work today.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.