November 11, 2007
Hop hop hop
PlayIdentify the woman in this picture (and also why she’s relevant to this site :-) ):
Additional clues:
Cracked by:Atul Mathew, Tathagata Chatterjee, alephnull, Gammafunction, shyam, udupendra, shivathilak, Hot Chick with Brains, samarth, iamniks, sparshithp, Ganesh Prasad, VikraM, shreyas, Suyog, ram, Dibyo, prasanth, sidsen, nisha’s thambi, Vinod, Keerthi Kiran M, jayanth, yaksha, BiGFooT and Shakeel.
She seems to have lots of fans… Answer:The woman is Hedy Lamarr. (Lots of you got that part)
Although most famous for being a very popular actress (back in the day), geeks remember her more for being one of the inventors of the earliest spread-spectrum technology known. Her idea was to use more of the spectrum by hopping frequencies, a technique now called (surprise, surprise) frequency-hopping spread spectrum.
Hot Chick with Brains also chimed in with more interesting trivia: Hedy’s likeness was also used on the logo/splash for CorelDraw. (HCwB: The Lena question may be coming soon.. It’s geek canon, we can’t not post it!)
Clue 1: Dr Isaac Kleiner’s Headcrab in the Half Life games was called Hedy Lamarr
Clue 2: Boeing ran a series of recruitment ads featuring Hedy solely as an inventor. This is one of them.
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Ruby Payne-Scott ??
I think not…and certainly, why would she be relevant to this site ? because she was a communist geek who married secretly ?????
Blame AutoRaja
Co-invented the first form of Spread Spectrum, a key to modern wireless communication. Her idea of “frequency hopping” was used later on as a basis to develop CDMA technology.
Regards,
Tathagata Chatterjee
Any chance of a question on the Lena image soon?
the second photo is of Dr. Isaac Kleiner from the game Half Life in which the crab is refeerred to as
lamarr and hedy!!
Grace Hopper, and the computer bug?
Blame AutoRaja
why is she relevant to this site?? she didnt make any money from the patent,and maybe you also are not.(a wild guess…..)
The advertisement, the second phase of the “Don’t Let History Happen Without You” campaign, focuses on the fact that the actress was also the co-inventor of a frequency-switching system for torpedo guidance
http://www.boeing.com/news/fro.....i_nan.html
Boeing’s recruitment ads featured her purely as a scientist, not as an actress… (1942 seen in the pic..)
Dr Isaac Kleinedr’s debeaked headcrab in Half Life 2 is called lamarr…
She co-invented a frequency hopped spread spectrum communication system used during WW2.
Hedy Lamarr (under her then-married name of Hedy Kiesler Markey) and composer George Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System on August 11, 1942. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
This idea was controversial and ahead of its time and technology. The technology was not implemented until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba,[3] after the patent had expired. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil (who died in 1959) made any money from the patent. Perhaps due to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution.[1]
Lamarr’s frequency-hopping idea served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. The technology in particular that is often attributed to her and George Antheil is CDMA.[4]
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council but she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.
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The advertisement, the second phase of the “Don’t Let History Happen Without You” campaign, focuses on the fact that the actress was also the co-inventor of a frequency-switching system for torpedo guidance. The ad features a young, sultry Lamarr, nicknamed “the most beautiful woman in films,” against a background image of a current satellite antenna, with the title “A moment of insight that helped secure the future.”
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