Frequency Hopping: How Hedy Lamarr Used Analogy to Spark a New Technology

Hedy Lamarr was never one for conventions.

As a young actress in the 1930s, she flouted the Hollywood social scene.

Instead, she filled her free time experimenting and inventing things.

One of her inventions was a tablet that could be dissolved in water to make a soft drink.

She also wanted to make a difference.

During World War II, she heard about how German submarines were targeting passenger ships and was compelled to help figure out a solution.

Allied defense relied on torpedoes, which were powerful but difficult to control.

Radio signals were the best technology at the time, but radio could be jammed by enemies.

What if, Lamarr thought, the signal could hop from frequency to frequency? An enemy might jam one frequency, but only for an instant and then the signal would move on.

The trick was to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver to know which frequency to hop to and when.

With her experience in the entertainment industry, Lamarr drew an analogy to the player piano, which spins a roll of teeth to trigger certain keys at a given time.

The result was what Lamarr called a ‘Secret Communication System’, a technology that she patented in 1941.

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Jeff Bezos tells the story of how he knew he wasn’t cut out for theoretical physics.

He had spent hours trying to solve a partial differential equation with his roommate and had come up empty.

They turned to the smartest guy on campus, Yasantha, and showed him the problem.

He looked it over and then turned to Bezos and said, “Cosine.”

Then he wrote several pages of algebra, crossed everything else, and the result was cosine.

In disbelief, Bezos asked, “Did you just do that in your head?”

Yasantha replied, “No, that would be impossible. Three years ago, I solved a very similar problem and I was able to map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.”

One of the great thinkers of the 20th century, John Von Neumann used a similar approach to solve hundreds of impossible mathematical problems.

By drawing an analogy to similar problems, you can use similar solutions to solve the problem at hand.

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Lamarr gave her patent to the Navy free of charge in hopes they would put it to use, though it got buried in paperwork.

Only after the war did the Navy realize how brilliant the idea was and put it to use in what they called a ‘sonobuoy’.

Frequency hopping is also the basis for the technology behind Bluetooth and WiFi.

When one of the pioneers in wireless communications discovered Lamarr’s patent and gave her an honorary award, she replied in classic Lamarr style, “Well, it’s about time.”