A frequency plan encoded as a musical score, automatically played and synchronized by a transmitter and a receiver, using a mechanized score repeater: this is the idea conceived by Hedy Lamarr together with musician George Antheil in the 1940s, today considered the basis of Wi-Fi Internet technologies and Bluetooth.
Long famous only for her acting career, Hedwig Maria Eva Kiesler has been increasingly recognised as the inventor of a long-distance communication system for torpedoes, which in her intentions could have helped mankind defeat Nazism. The patent given to the US Navywas first locked in a drawer, but later proved to be the basis of similar applications during the Cuban missile crisis. Once military secret fell, it was more widely adopted in the telecommunications industry, from the 1990s onward.
From satellites to Internet Wi-Fi, up to the very common Bluetooth, various systems today rely on the intuition and the analysis elaborated by the Austrian actress and researcher. Although 50 years later, Hedy Lamarr’s intuition still managed to change the future of billions of people.
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Pioneers of the future - A podcast series by Infra The Mundys Journal
Pioneers of the future is the second podcast season by Infra Journal. A four-installments journey through the times up to the most recent years, featuring the lives and adventures of the innovators who shaped our present.
How is a breakthrough invention conceived? Which challenges had its creator to overcome? What were the needs, the fears and the beliefs of these pioneers in thought and imagination? Pioneers of the future collects the stories of the masters who changed the course of times, through a podcast narration, voices, anecdotes and interviews.
Men and women, well known and less well known, who remained faithful to their ideals and intuitions, even when nobody else was able to see along with them. Nowadays, their ideas are everyday in our hands, as Prometheus's sparkle legacy, still capable of lighting up our way of living, communicating, moving and traveling. All around the world.