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ECSTACY 9/7/2013 8:43:36 AM
While researching material for my novel Tycoon! I ran across the story of Hedwig Kiesler. I chose not to use it, however, as it did not fit the narrative I had in mind, although I owned several stills from her foreign movie.
I ignored the film until I received an email last spring from my former boss, Roger Ardston, suggesting the story for a future column. I dug it out and blew off the dust. Ardston, a cinema aficionado himself, gave me permission to use the yarn as he had written it…. Somewhat edited and re-written because of space requirements, etc., I have re-produced it here:
It is the story of how a brilliant starlet created a worldwide technology boom.
The year was 1933, when an 18 year old, beautiful young Austrian woman took off all her clothes for the movie director, Gustav Machtý. She ran through the woods completely naked. She swam naked in a lake. Pushing well beyond the social norms of the period, the movie also featured a simulated orgasm. To make the scene realistic, the director, Machtý, accomplished his goal by probing the actress’s genitalia with a penis-shaped safety pin just off-screen.
Not a single line was included in AFI’s l00 most memorable quotes compilation of 2013 (it is made up entirely of American entries).
The most popular American film in 1933 was unquestionably King Kong (a clip is included in the memorable quotes listing). But everyone in Hollywood was talking about the scandalous movie, with the naked and gorgeous young Austrian woman whose orgasms were induced by a safety pin.
Louis B. Mayer, who owned the giant MGM franchise, was not the Tycoon! of my last finished novel. Nor was Samuel Goldwyn, whose name also appeared on the studio flagstaff (it is an assumption that Goldwyn [whose real name Goldfish] never set foot in MGM, as his hatred of Mayer is legendary).
The reasons for their dislike of each other followed them to their graves, but it is a safe bet it had to do with money — like everything else, like then as now, like always, since the beginning of time.
Anyway, I digress. . . Mayer claimed Hedwig was the most beautiful woman in the world, and her movie was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more popular and more valuable. Mussolini reputedly refused to sell his copy at any price, even when the crazed mob was about to hang him, his mistress and their entourage upside down from a balcony in Switzerland.
There was a rumor that even Adolph Hitler took up with Eva Braun because of her similar physical attributes (you had to be there, I guess, to see for yourself. No question Hitler was crazy.)
The star of the film, called Ecstasy (it had nothing to do with drugs), was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of her beauty was to lie there and look stupid. In reality, Ms Kiesler was anything but stupid. She was a manifest genius.
She had grown up as the only child of a prominent Jewish banker. She was a math prodigy. She excelled at science. Yet as she grew older, she became somewhat ruthless, using all the power of her beauty, her body and mind to achieve whatever ideas she had.
Between the sexual roles she played, her tremendous beauty only added to the power of her intellect, and she would confound the men in her life, including her six husbands, as well as two of the most venomous dictators of the 20th century — thank God she never met Hirohito! — although she did eventually meet one of the greatest movie producers in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer.
Her beauty made her rich for a time. She is said to have made — and spent — at least 30 million dollars (by today’s standards that is nearly a billion $!), but her greatest accomplishment resulted from her intellect. Her inventions continue to shape the world we live in today.
You see, this young Austrian starlet would come up with one of the most valuable technologies ever developed. Adolph Hitler never knew it, but she took it right from under his nose. After fleeing to America, she not only became a major Hollywood star, but her name was on one of the most important patents ever granted by the U.S. Patent Office.
Today, whenever you use your cell phone or, over the next few years, as you experience super fast wireless Internet access (via something called Long-Term Evolution, or LTE), you will be using an extension of the idea a 20- year-old actress first conceived while sitting at dinner with the German despot, Adolph Hitler!
At the time she made Ecstasy, Hedwig Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Europe. Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian, was his country’s leading arms maker. His firm, along with Friedrich Krupp of Germany, was to become a key supplier to the Nazis’ fantasy of conquering the world.
Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners he held with representatives of Austrian, Italian, and German fascists. One of Mandl's favorite topics at these gatherings, which, of course, included Hitler and Mussolini, was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes, an invention his wife had created.
Wireless weapons offered far greater range than the wire-controlled alternatives that prevailed at the time. Ms Kiesler sat through these dinners looking stupid while absorbing everything she heard.
As a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis. She abhorred her husband's business dealings. Once, Mandl retaliated against his wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape. She somehow drugged her maid, sneaked out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes, and sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London (a plot that in itself was worthy of at least a John LeCarre novel).
She got out just in time. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl's factory (he was Kiesler’s first husband). He was half Jewish, so he fled to Brazil. Later, he became an advisor to Argentina's iconic populist president, Juan Peron (another great plot? — maybe I should abandon my current work-in-progress).
In London, Hedwig Kiesler arranged a meeting for herself with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM's biggest stars. She appeared in more than 20 films. She was to co-star (which she did, with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Victor Mature, Paul Henreid, John Hodiak, Peter Lorrie, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Charles Boyer and even Bob Hope). Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster that made millions.
But Ms Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies. At the height of her fame, in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications system, optimized for sending coded messages that could not be jammed.
She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their targets. She was building a system to kill Nazis.
By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces abandoned using the kind of single-frequency radio-controlled technology Kiesler's ex-husband had been peddling. The drawback of this technology was that the enemy could find the appropriate frequency and jam, or intercept the signal, thereby interfering with the missile's intended path.
Kiesler's key innovation was to change the channel originally thought sacrosanct. It was a way of encoding a message across a broad area of the wireless spectrum. If one part of the spectrum got jammed, the message would still get through on one of the other frequencies she decided to
use.
The problem was, she could not figure out how to synchronize the frequency changes on both the receiver and the transmitter. To solve this problem, she turned to perhaps the world's first techno-musician,, George Anthiel, in a move that allowed her to adapt the frequency to synchronization.
Anthiel, an acquaintance of Ms Kiesler’s in America, had achieved some notoriety for creating intricate musical compositions. He synchronized his melodies across twelve player pianos, producing a stereophonic sound no one had ever heard before.
Hedwig Kiesler incorporated Anthiel's technology for synchronizing his player pianos (after all, a single piano was 88 keys!). Then, using twelve piano rolls, she was able to synchronize the frequency changes between weapons' receiver and transmitter.
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2292387 was granted to George Antheil and Hedwig Kiesler Markey, which was Kiesler's second husband, (the sixth was Lewis Boies, her divorce lawyer, in 1963 — perhaps she figured it was cheaper to marry him than to hire him).
Anyhow, just stop and think, without that patented device, we would not have pilot-less UAV bombers in the Middle East or anyplace else today!
Hedwig Kiesler died in 1988, at age 85 (ten years younger than my ancient mother-in-law who is still with us, having been born in Detroit rather than Vienna).
Most people will not recognize the name Hedwig Kiesler. And no one, for sure, would remember the name Hedwig Markey. But it is a fair bet that anyone reading this column will remember one of the great beauties of Hollywood's golden age — Hedy Lamarr.
That is the name Louis B. Mayer gave to his prize actress. That is the name his movie company made even more famous: Hedy Lamarr.
Meanwhile, almost no one knows Hedwig Kiesler — aka Hedy Lamarr — notwithstanding that she was one of the great pioneers of wireless communications. Her technology was later adapted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which has used it ever since.
We are still using Hedy Lamarr's — aka Hedwig Kiesler’s — technology today. Her patents sit at the foundation of spread spectrum technology, which we use every day when we log on to Wi-Fi internets or make calls with our cell phones. It lies at the heart of the massive investments being made right now in so-called fourth-generation LTE wireless technology.
According to Steve Jobs before he passed away, the next generation of cell telephones and cell towers will provide tremendous increases to wireless network speed and quality, by spreading wireless signals across the entire available spectrum. This kind of encoding is only possible using the frequency switching that Hedwig Kiesler, better known as Hedy Lamarr, invented when she was not being induced to have orgasms on film.
Even Bill Gates said, All us owe Hedy Lamarr a tip of the hat. If she were still alive today, I would offer a seat on our board of directors at whatever salary would entice her.
