Happy Birthday, Hedy Lamarr!! Please Read ...
How the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Invented a System for Remote-Controlling Torpedoes
by Michelle Legro
“When you talk to a sympathetic mind about technology, gender, age and experience disappear completely.”
In 1937, the dinner table of Fritz Mandl — an arms dealer who sold to both sides during the Spanish Civil War and the third richest man in Austria — entertained high-ranking Nazi officials who chatted about the newest munitions technologies. Mandl’s wife, a twenty-four-year-old former movie star, whom he respected but also claimed “didn’t know A from Z,” sat quietly listening.
Hedy Kiestler, whose parents were assimilated Jews, and who would be rechristened one year later by Louis B. Meyer as Hedy Lamarr, wanted to escape to Hollywood and return to the screen. From these dinner parties, she knew about about submarines and wire-guided torpedoes, about the multiple frequencies used to guide bombs. She knew that she had present herself as the glamorous wife of an arms dealer. And she knew that in order to leave her husband, she would have to take a good amount of this information with her.
Richard Rhodes’s fascinating new book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, explores a golden age of creativity among artists in Europe and America, whose job was to entertain but who were inclined to something more, and the war’s effect on these brilliant, frustrated exiles.
Rhodes, author of four books about the creation of the atomic bomb, intersects Hedy’s story with that of American composer George Antheil, who lived during the 1920s with his wife in Paris above the newly opened Shakespeare & Co, and who could count among his friends Man Ray, Ezra Pound, Louise Bryant, and Igor Stravinsky. When Antheil attended the premiere of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the composer invited him afterward to a player piano factory, where he wished to have his work punched out for posterity. There, Antheil conceived of a grand composition for sixteen player pianos, bells, sirens, and several airplane propellers, which he called his Ballet mecanique. When he premiered the work in the US, the avant-garde composition proved a disaster.
more at link:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/08/hedys-folly/
= new reply since forum marked as read
