<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find someone

<v Speaker 1>that you may have never heard of, that did something

<v Speaker 1>amazing and then slipped through the cracks of time. Back

<v Speaker 1>in the nineteen forties, she was considered the most beautiful

<v Speaker 1>woman in the world. Men lined up around the block

<v Speaker 1>just to get a quick look at her. Directors built

<v Speaker 1>whole films around that face. Her beauty was described as blinding.

<v Speaker 1>It was so blinding, in fact, that no one ever

<v Speaker 1>bothered to ask what was going on behind it, and

<v Speaker 1>what was going on inside the brain behind that beautiful

<v Speaker 1>face was pretty amazing. In the evenings, after the camera

<v Speaker 1>stopped and the interviews were done and all the autographs

<v Speaker 1>have been signed for the day, she was sitting at

<v Speaker 1>a table in her own home inventing. And one of

<v Speaker 1>the things she invented is something that has changed our

<v Speaker 1>world for better or worse, in ways she could never

<v Speaker 1>have imagined. If you are familiar with her name, it's

<v Speaker 1>probably because it was used as a running joke in

<v Speaker 1>the movie Blazing Saddles. Her name was Hetty Lamar, and

<v Speaker 1>she was so much more than just another pretty face

<v Speaker 1>from hay Dad Productions. This is Anonymous America. She was

<v Speaker 1>born Hedwig Keisler in Vienna, Austria, in nineteen fourteen. She

<v Speaker 1>was an only child from a Jewish family. She was

<v Speaker 1>whip smart and restless. Now Her father, who was a banker,

<v Speaker 1>used to take Hedwig for walks around the city with

<v Speaker 1>her friend and explain how things work, like how a

<v Speaker 1>streetcar ran or how a printing press worked, and she

<v Speaker 1>never forgot the things that her dad taught her. As

<v Speaker 1>a teenager, she decided to give acting a try, and

<v Speaker 1>at nineteen she became famous for all the wrong reasons,

<v Speaker 1>a scandalous European film that made head Keisler a household

<v Speaker 1>name and a target for gossip on two continents. The

<v Speaker 1>film was called Ecstasy, and in nineteen thirty three, its

<v Speaker 1>contents were a no no. Heady appeared nude in several scenes,

<v Speaker 1>and one close up shot, in particular of her face

<v Speaker 1>while in the throes of a rather intimate moment, caused

<v Speaker 1>pearls to be clutched around the world, and the reaction

<v Speaker 1>was exactly what you'd expect for nineteen thirty three, the

<v Speaker 1>movie was censored, it was cut, it was banned in

<v Speaker 1>several places and condemned by the Catholic Church. Even Hitler

<v Speaker 1>joined the fray banning Ecstasy from being shown in Germany.

<v Speaker 1>But let's be honest, Hitler banned it because the star

<v Speaker 1>of the movie was Jewish, not because she was naked.

<v Speaker 1>The movie and the scandal that erupted around it made

<v Speaker 1>her internationally famous and internationally infamous at the same time,

<v Speaker 1>and her controlling husband, Friedrich Mandel, was so mortified by

<v Speaker 1>it that he tried to buy up and destroy every

<v Speaker 1>single print of that film. I mean, after all, he

<v Speaker 1>had a reputation to uphold. Friedrich Mandel was one of

<v Speaker 1>the richest arms manufacturers in Europe, a man who made

<v Speaker 1>his fortune selling weapons to fascists, and who treated his

<v Speaker 1>beautiful young wife like just one more item in his collection.

<v Speaker 1>He was jealous, he was controlling. He rarely let her

<v Speaker 1>out of his sight, but he made sure to have

<v Speaker 1>her on his arm during his business dinners, long evenings

<v Speaker 1>with generals, engineers and weapons designers, arguing over munitions and

<v Speaker 1>torpedoes and the technology of war. Mandel thought he was

<v Speaker 1>just showing off his trophy wife. What he was actually

<v Speaker 1>doing was handing a brilliant, bored young woman of free

<v Speaker 1>education in military engineering. She sat there quietly night after

<v Speaker 1>night as she listened, and she remembered every word. Eventually,

<v Speaker 1>Hetty decided she couldn't stand being married to Friedrich one

<v Speaker 1>more day. Legend has it that she drugged the maid,

<v Speaker 1>who was also under order from Friedrich to keep an

<v Speaker 1>eye on her, and walked right out of the house.

<v Speaker 1>Now whether or not it actually happened that way, we

<v Speaker 1>don't really know. But she got out. She fled to Paris,

<v Speaker 1>and then she went to London. And in London she

<v Speaker 1>walked directly into the path of the most powerful man

<v Speaker 1>in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. He

<v Speaker 1>signed her, changed her name to Hetty Lamar, and shipped

<v Speaker 1>her off to America to become a star. And it worked.

<v Speaker 1>She became one of the biggest names on the screen.

<v Speaker 1>But at night, Hollywood's glamour queen would go home and

<v Speaker 1>pull out an inventor's table that she kept in the

<v Speaker 1>corner of the house. It was covered in tools and

<v Speaker 1>sketches and half built gadgets and dudads. Inventing was it

<v Speaker 1>just a hobby for Hetty. It was her way of

<v Speaker 1>using the part of her that the movie business had

<v Speaker 1>no use for it all. And then came the war.

<v Speaker 1>She watched Hitler march across the Europe she had escaped.

<v Speaker 1>She read about German submarines torpedoing ships full of civilians

<v Speaker 1>and heavy Lamar, who had soaked up years of weapons

<v Speaker 1>talk at her ex husband's dinner table, decided she was

<v Speaker 1>going to do something about it. Now Here was the

<v Speaker 1>problem she set out to solve. The navy had radio

<v Speaker 1>controlled torpedoes, but the enemy could find the single radio

<v Speaker 1>frequency guiding one of those torpedoes and jam it, knock

<v Speaker 1>it completely off course with a burst of static. One

<v Speaker 1>frequency equaled one big weakness. Her idea was simple and

<v Speaker 1>at the time almost unthinkable. What if the signal didn't

<v Speaker 1>sit on one frequency. What if the transmitter and the

<v Speaker 1>receiver both hopped together from frequency to frequency to frequency

<v Speaker 1>dozens of times a second in a secret pattern only

<v Speaker 1>the two of them knew, because you can't jam what

<v Speaker 1>you can't find. But there was a catch, and it

<v Speaker 1>was a doozy. How do you get a transmitter and

<v Speaker 1>receiver miles apart to hop in perfect lockstep. She found

<v Speaker 1>the answer in one of the strangest places ever, an

<v Speaker 1>avant garde composer named George Anthiel, who had once synchronized

<v Speaker 1>an entire room full of player pianos for a performance. Together,

<v Speaker 1>the movie star and the composer built their hopping pattern

<v Speaker 1>the same way a player piano reads a paper roll,

<v Speaker 1>and they used eighty eight frequencies, eighty eight the number

<v Speaker 1>of keys on a piano. In nineteen forty two, the

<v Speaker 1>two of them were granted a United States patent for

<v Speaker 1>what they called a secret communication system. Heady Lamar movie

<v Speaker 1>Star was now Heady Lamar Inventor of Record. And then

<v Speaker 1>the United States Navy took a look at the invention

<v Speaker 1>of the most famous actress in the world and promptly

<v Speaker 1>slid it into a drawer. They told her, more or less,

<v Speaker 1>stick to what you're good for. If you really want

<v Speaker 1>to help the war effort, they said, go out and

<v Speaker 1>sell war bonds with that beautiful face of yours. So

<v Speaker 1>she did. She sold millions of dollars of war bonds,

<v Speaker 1>and her invention sat in that drawer the whole time,

<v Speaker 1>and the patent quietly expired, and she never earned a

<v Speaker 1>single dollar from it. But an idea like that is

<v Speaker 1>just too good to stay buried, and years later, long

<v Speaker 1>after the patent had run out, the military pulled the

<v Speaker 1>concept of frequency hopping back off the shelf and put

<v Speaker 1>it to work, and the engineers built on it and

<v Speaker 1>built on it until it became the foundation of something

<v Speaker 1>we now called the spread spectrum. Now that is the technology,

<v Speaker 1>in one form or another, behind your WiFi, your Bluetooth,

<v Speaker 1>your GPS, the invisible signal that ties the phone in

<v Speaker 1>your pocket to the rest of the world has a

<v Speaker 1>pioneer's fingerprint all over it. And that pioneer was a

<v Speaker 1>woman Hollywood had written off as nothing more than a

<v Speaker 1>beautiful face. Hettie Lamar got almost nothing for an invention

<v Speaker 1>that changed the world. Not the money, not the credit,

<v Speaker 1>not the fame, and eventually her movie career faded out

<v Speaker 1>as well, and the remaining years of her life were

<v Speaker 1>both lonely and hard. For decades, if you had told

<v Speaker 1>someone that she was one of the mothers of modern wireless,

<v Speaker 1>they would have laughed at you. But finally, in nineteen

<v Speaker 1>ninety seven, when Hetty was in her eighties living far

<v Speaker 1>out of the public eye, a group of technologists tracked

<v Speaker 1>her down to give her an award for the invention.

<v Speaker 1>She didn't bother attending the ceremony to accept the award

<v Speaker 1>in person, but she did send back a short message,

<v Speaker 1>and it may be the truest three words anyone ever

<v Speaker 1>said about her life. The message simply said, it's about time.

<v Speaker 1>That's hetty Lamar, and that's anonymous America.