Business Opportunities Weblog

March 31, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

BusinessWeek:

US Magazine has a section called “Just Like Us!” that showcases celebrities who are unwittingly photographed doing chores readers recognize from their own, less glamorous existences. “Britney carries groceries!” “J-Lo changes diapers!”

We all know that by dint of their fame and fortune, these stars are nothing like us at all. Here’s another way some stars are different: They’re inventors, too. When they’re not at center stage, screen or limelight, they’re inventing things and getting patents on the handiwork.

Just because someone has a patent on a mousetrap, it doesn’t mean you can’t invent an improved version. An improvement is every bit as patentable as the underlying technology. Consider famed Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr was best known as a leading Hollywood actress of the early and mid-twentieth century for her roles in movies such as Samson and Delilah and Ziegfeld Girl. She also happens to have invented an important communication technology that is still used by the military.

Lamarr’s first husband (of six) was a leading manufacturer of armaments and military aircraft in pre-WWII Germany. Apparently having learned from him, Lamarr came up with an idea for a “frequency hopping” technology for controlling torpedoes. At that time, radio control of torpedoes was already known. The problem was preventing someone from discovering the control frequency and jamming the signal.

Lamarr’s improvement was to have the transmitter send signals while “hopping” from frequency to frequency in quick succession.

If the receiver on the torpedo was synced to hop frequencies in time with the transmitter, the torpedo would receive the full signal. By doing this, someone tuning into one of the used frequencies would only detect a brief piece of the signal. What Lamarr could not figure out was how to synchronize the transmitter and receiver.

In 1940, after moving to the United States, she mentioned her idea to a neighbor during a conversation regarding breast augmentation (true story). The neighbor, a trained pianist, suggested using the same perforated paper rolls in the transmitter and receiver that are used in player pianos, enabling 88 different frequencies. Together, they filed for and received a patent as co-inventors. The rest, as they say, is history.

Although skeptics in the U.S. Navy prevented frequency hopping from being developed at the time, it was later adopted (with electronics, instead of piano rolls) in the late 1950s and continues to be used by the military to this day. Lamarr didn’t invent radio control; she improved upon it. But her improvement was patentable in its own right and, arguably, just as valuable.

Photo by Wikipedia/Google.

In Inventions | 0 Comments
Tags: Creativity, Military