Real Live Mail Girl

Safe and sound. Happy B-day, if I didn't say that before.

Here's what I was saying about Hedy...

Those who remember Austrian Hedy Lamarr today most likely think of her as the sexy Hollywood actress of moderate success in the 1930s and 1940s who was notorious for having appeared nude in a European film called Ecstasy in 1931. Few would expect to see her included as one of the 200 entries in a volume entitled Leaders of the Information Age. However, she is included in this book and with some justification, too, since she and avante garde composer George Antheil received a patent in 1942 for a device to enable radio signals to change frequencies rapidly. They envisioned this system to be useful in combating radio-controlled torpedoes used by Nazi submarines. While this system was never put into practice and the patent lapsed, the idea was later used by the U.S. military in the 1950s and 1960s. Today the concept is utilized every day by cellular phones and pagers. All of which means that, in a quirky way,
Hedy Lamarr was a leader of the Information Age.