Richard Rhodes - Hedy's Folly

Invention is a strange business. Is it creative, like painting or sculpture? Its certainly original, by definition genuinely new, but its also and fundamentally practical. Patent law says an idea must be reduced to practice to be patentable. That means an idea must be embodied in some new and useful mechanism or process or material. So invention is creative, but not in the same way the fine arts are. Usefulness isnt fundamental to a sculpture or a painting.

Is invention, then, scientific? Many inventions today are explicitly derived from scientific discoveries. The discovery that certain materials, stimulated in a particular way, would emit coherent lightlight all of the same wavelengthled to the invention of the laser. The laser was a practical device that embodied the discovery, but it wasnt the discovery itself. The distinction is clear even in prescientific times: Fire was a discovery; the fireplace was an invention. That fire hardened clay was a discovery; pottery was an invention. Again, as with fine art, usefulness isnt a requirement for scientific discovery.

That invention is different from fine art or scientific discovery suggests that inventors might be different from artists or scientists. They are. Many inventors are technically trained, of course, especially those who invent professionally. Thomas Edison was home- and self-educated, but Nikola Tesla, the inventor of radio, was an electrical engineer. Some inventors have been artists. Samuel F. B. Morse, the co-inventor of the telegraph, was a professional painter. The same person might do science and invent. I knew such a person, a Nobel laureate American physicist named Luis Alvarez. Luiss many inventions won him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He told me once that he valued his recognition as an inventor more than the Nobel.

But many inventors, past and present, have been people with no obvious special qualifications for inventing. Come to think of it, there are no special qualifications for inventing. No school I know of offers such a degree. As a sculptor is someone who sculpts, as a writer is someone who writes, an inventor is someone who invents.

The 1940s Austrian-American movie star Hedy Lamarr was an inventor. The public-relations department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Hedy began her American film career, put out the claim that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and by Western standards she may have been. It annoyed her deeply, however, that few people saw beyond her beauty to her intelligence. Any girl can be glamorous, she famously and acidly said. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

Hedy invented as a hobby. Since she made two or three movies a year, each one taking about a month to shoot, she had spare time to fill. She didnt drink and she didnt like to party, so she took up inventing. When she was a girl, her father, a Viennese banker, had encouraged her interest in how the world worked, taking walks with her and explaining the mechanics of the machinery they encountered. As a young woman, before she emigrated from Austria to the United States, she married a munitions manufacturer and listened in on the technical discussions he held with his Austrian and German military clients. She also had a keen sense of the worlds large and small failings, some of which she decided she could fix. In Hollywood she set up an inventors corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp and all the necessary drafting tools.

Hedy conceived of her most important invention in 1941, in the dark years between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that finally impelled the United States to enter the war. She wanted to help her newly adopted country (where she was still technically an enemy alien) and saw the need for a weapon to attack the German submarines that were devastating North Atlantic shipping. Its characteristic of her confidence in her inventive gift that she believed she could devise such a weapon and help change the course of the war. Her belief was folly in two senses of that fine old word: extravagant in consequential invention, and founded on the foolish notion that the United States Navy would take correction from a Hollywood actress of great beauty in a matter about which it was not prepared to listen to its own submarine commanders.

Her unlikely, but ideal, partner in that work was an avant-garde composer and concert pianist named George Antheil, at five feet four a cello-sized man, as Time magazine put it, a New Jersey native whose father owned a shoe store. Antheil was not, like Hedy, an amateur inventor, but he was nearly polymathic in his gifts. When Hedy revealed her idea to him, he immediately saw a way to give it practical form for the purpose of patenting it.

That practical form linked back to Antheils most notorious composition, a twenty-minute rhythmic cacophony of grand pianos, electric bells, drums, xylophones, a siren, a gong, an airplane propeller, and sixteen synchronized player pianos called Ballet mcanique, which premiered in Paris in 1926. In his Paris days, before he moved to Hollywood to make a living writing film scores, Antheil was a good friend of Ernest Hemingway, Igor Stravinsky, the bookseller Sylvia Beach (the Antheils lived for ten years in a small apartment on the mezzanine of Beachs famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore), James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and most of the rest of the fabled crowd of expatriates who helped make Paris a world center of art, music, and literature in the years between the two world wars.

Hedy in Vienna, George in Paris, and then the two of them meeting up in Hollywood to invent a fundamental new wireless technology makes a remarkable story at the center of Hedy Lamarrs long and fascinating life. Except in the matter of her beauty, which she valued least of all, people regularly underestimated her. She deserved better. The real story will amaze you.

She was Viennese, not yet seventeen in the spring of 1931 but already a professional actress, in rehearsal for a play. Hedwig Kiesler (pronounced HAYD-vig KEES-lur)Hedyhad won a small role in the Berlin incarnation of The Weaker Sex, which the celebrated Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt was directing. When Reinhardt restaged the play in Vienna that spring, she had single-mindedly quit the Berlin cast and followed him home. Are you here too, Fraulein Kiesler? hed asked her in surprise. Are you living with your family? All right, you can be the Americaness again. douard Bourdets play was a comedy with a pair of boorish stage Americans as foils. Reinhardt had assigned the actor George Weller, Hedys husband in the play, to teach her some American songs. I took this as a mandate to make an American out of Hedy Kiesler, the young Bostonian recalled.

She was eager to be transformed. Hedy had only the vaguest ideas of what the United States were, Weller discovered, except that they were grouped around Hollywood. She idolized the California tennis star Helen Wills, Little Miss Poker Face. Wills, focused and unexpressive on the courts, all business, was the worlds number-one-ranked female tennis player, midway that year through an unbroken run of 180 victories. Watch me look like Helen Wills, Hedy teased Weller when they rehearsed together.