A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

in Design, Technology | May 3rd, 2017

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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200 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online

in History, Technology | April 18th, 2017

Last month, Lawrence Liv­er­more Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry put on YouTube 200 now-declas­si­fied videos doc­u­ment­ing Amer­i­can nuclear tests con­duct­ed between 1945 and 1962. Accord­ing the Lab, “around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scat­tered across the coun­try in high-secu­ri­ty vaults. Not only were they gath­er­ing dust, the film mate­r­i­al itself was slow­ly decom­pos­ing, bring­ing the data they con­tained to the brink of being lost for­ev­er.”

In the first video above, weapon physi­cist Greg Sprig­gs dis­cuss­es how a team of experts sal­vaged these decom­pos­ing films, with the hope that they can “pro­vide bet­ter data to the post-test­ing-era sci­en­tists who use com­put­er codes to help cer­ti­fy that the aging U.S. nuclear deter­rent remains safe, secure and effec­tive.”

If you click the for­ward but­ton, the playlist will skip to the next video, the first of 63 nuclear tests. Sev­er­al of those clips you can watch below:

Oper­a­tion Hard­tack

Oper­a­tion Plumb­bob

Oper­a­tion Teapot

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Gives a Ser­mon on the Fool­ish­ness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Time­ly Again (Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

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200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action

in History, Technology | March 27th, 2017

The robots, as we all know, are com­ing for our jobs. We might regard that par­tic­u­lar anx­i­ety as dis­tinc­tive of the dig­i­tal age, but the idea of machines that per­form what we’ve long con­sid­ered specif­i­cal­ly human tasks has a long his­to­ry — as does the real­i­ty of those machines. The BBC video above offers a look at “The Writer,” which the New York Times’ Sonia Kolesnikov-Jes­sop describes as an “ear­ly humanoid robot of carved wood” who, “seat­ed at a small mahogany table, could write on paper using a goose­feath­er quill.” The date of this impres­sive curios­i­ty’s cre­ation? The decid­ed­ly pre-dig­i­tal year of 1768. The Writer has at his core a sys­tem of intri­cate clock­work, and so it stands to rea­son that its inven­tor Pierre Jaquet-Droz spent his career as a Swiss watch­mak­er.

“In the fol­low­ing years, work­ing with the help of his son, Hen­ri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, and his fel­low clock­mak­er Jean-Frédéric Leschot,” writes Kolesnikov-Jes­sop, “he also cre­at­ed The Musi­cian, a mechan­i­cal young woman who could play five tunes on an organ, and The Draughts­man, a ‘child’ able to draw four sep­a­rate images includ­ing that of a dog and a por­trait of a man.”

But The Writer, with its abil­i­ty to dip its quill in ink, its mov­ing eyes, and the wheel that makes it “pro­gram­ma­ble” to write any short mes­sage, remains both Jaquet-Droz’s most intri­cate and most impor­tant mechan­i­cal achieve­ment. You can see more pieces of his work, automa­tons and oth­er­wise, put into con­text in the short film just above, a pro­duc­tion of the Jaquet Droz lux­u­ry watch brand still in exis­tence today.

Upon hear­ing word of such “automa­tons,” oth­er inven­tors fol­lowed suit. Arti­fi­cial writ­ing remained a goal: more than forty years after The Writer, for instance, Hen­ri Mail­lardet built one capa­ble of “hand”-reproducing four draw­ings and three poems stored in its “brass mem­o­ry.” But oth­er automa­ton-builders had cho­sen to widen the field of mechan­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties: in 1784, the famed Ger­man cab­i­net­mak­er David Roent­gen pre­sent­ed to King Louis XVI a dul­cimer-play­ing automa­ton mod­eled after Queen Marie Antoinette. While the Queen thrilled to musi­cal per­for­mances from her own minia­ture like­ness, automa­ta made anoth­er kind of progress on the oth­er side of the world in Japan, a land that had almost no con­tact with the West until the mid-18th cen­tu­ry but whose tra­di­tions of craft stretch even deep­er into his­to­ry than Europe’s.

You can wit­ness in the video just above an unbox­ing, oper­a­tion, and inter­nal exam­i­na­tion of the best-known such Japan­ese karakuri, a spring-pow­ered archer that can load arrows into its bow and fire away. Its cre­ator Tana­ka Hisas­hige, also known as “the Thomas Edi­son of Japan,” built a fair few of these clock­work amuse­ments that still impress today, but also many more use­ful things, includ­ing a pneu­mat­ic fire pump, a uni­ver­sal clock, and the first Japan­ese steam loco­mo­tive and war­ship. His com­pa­ny Tana­ka Engi­neer­ing Works, found­ed in 1875, would lat­er evolve into the elec­tron­ics firm called Toshi­ba — devel­op­ers of Aiko Chi­hi­ra, who in 2015 became the world’s first robot­ic depart­ment-store employ­ee. Retail is one thing, but will her even more advanced descen­dants find it in them­selves to pick up the quill, the dul­cimer ham­mers, or the bow and arrow?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT Cre­ates Amaz­ing Self-Fold­ing Origa­mi Robots & Leap­ing Chee­tah Robots

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

New Jorge Luis Borges-Inspired Project Will Test Whether Robots Can Appre­ci­ate Poet­ry

Autonomous Fly­ing Robots Play the Theme From the James Bond Movies

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Marshall McLuhan in Two Minutes: A Brief Animated Introduction to the 1960s Media Theorist Who Predicted Our Present

in Technology | March 17th, 2017

Mar­shall McLuhan, writes nov­el­ist and artist Dou­glas Cou­p­land, entered the zeit­geist in the 1960s as “a guru or as a vil­lain – as a har­bin­ger of the flow­er­ing of cul­ture, or of its death,” a “fud­dy-dud­dy fiftysome­thing Eng­lish lit pro­fes­sor from Toron­to” whose dis­tinc­tive research inter­ests and even more dis­tinc­tive habits of mind empow­ered him to come up with still-res­o­nant insights into the mod­ern media land­scape. He knew “that the point of much of tech­nol­o­gy, TV, for instance, was­n’t the con­tent of the shows you were watch­ing on it. Rather, what mat­tered was mere­ly the fact that you were watch­ing TV. The act of ana­lyz­ing the con­tent of TV – or of oth­er medi­ums – is either sen­ti­men­tal or it’s beside the point.” The medi­um, in oth­er words, is the mes­sage.

That best-known of McLuhan’s prophet­ic one-lin­ers (on which he expands in the ABC Radio Nation­al talk below) remains as true now as it was when it first appeared in his book Under­stand­ing Media: The Exten­sions of Man in 1964.

Cou­p­land empha­sizes that dif­fer­ent kinds of media, then as now, “force you to favor cer­tain parts of your brain over oth­ers,” which we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry know from inten­sive dai­ly expe­ri­ence: “that hour you spent on Face­book came at the expense of some oth­er way of using your brain, most like­ly TV view­ing or book-read­ing, though as books and TV recede, ever more web-medi­at­ed activ­i­ties will replace each oth­er to the point where we’ll have long for­got­ten what the pre-elec­tron­ic mind was to begin with.”

Cou­p­land once wrote a kind of biog­ra­phy of McLuhan that dis­tilled the thinker’s life, work, and cur­rent rel­e­vance into less than 250 pages, but the video at the top of the post, com­mis­sioned by Al Jazeera from ani­ma­tor Daniel Sav­age and nar­rat­ed by Hong Kong activist Alex Chow, does it in just over two min­utes. Chow reminds us that, even today, “if you don’t under­stand the medi­um, you don’t ful­ly under­stand the mes­sage,” look­ing back to the inven­tion of the print­ing press, and thus of mass media, and how its forms “changed our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence. It informed our col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty, how we imag­ined our­selves.” In what McLuhan called the “elec­tric envi­ron­ment,” where “every­thing hap­pens at once. There’s no con­ti­nu­ity, there’s no con­nec­tion, there’s no fol­low-through. It’s just all now,” we will expe­ri­ence the end of secre­cy, and with it “the end of monop­o­lies of knowl­edge.”

55 years ago, McLuhan wrote that “the next medi­um, what­ev­er it is – it may be the exten­sion of con­scious­ness – will include tele­vi­sion as its con­tent, not as its envi­ron­ment. A com­put­er as a research and com­mu­ni­ca­tion instru­ment could enhance retrieval, obso­lesce mass library orga­ni­za­tion, retrieve the indi­vid­u­al’s ency­clo­pe­dic func­tion and flip it into a pri­vate line to speed­i­ly tai­lored data of a sal­able kind.” As we’ve since dis­cov­ered, these devel­op­ments have both their upsides and down­sides. But as Cou­p­land writes, con­sid­er that pas­sage seri­ous­ly and “see if it does­n’t give you a chill.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (1976)

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Hear Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Medi­um is the Mas­sage (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present

in History, Media, Technology | March 17th, 2017

Buck­ling under infor­ma­tion over­load?

The long view can be sooth­ing, as film­mak­er Josh Beg­ley proves in just under a minute, above. The data artist reduced 165 years worth of chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered New York Times front pages—every sin­gle one since 1852—to a grid of inky rec­tan­gles flash­ing past at light­ning speed.

You won’t be able to make out the head­lines as the front page news whips past to the some­what omi­nous strains of com­pos­er Philip Glass’ ”Dead Things.”

Instead the impres­sion is of watch­ing something—or someone—steadily bear­ing wit­ness.

Obvi­ous­ly, any rep­utable new source does more than sim­ply note the unfold­ing of events. Its read­ers look to it as a source of analy­sis and cri­tique, in addi­tion to well-researched fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion.

The Gray Lady, as the Times has long been known, has recent­ly weath­ered an uptick in slings and arrows from both the left and the right, yet her longevi­ty is not eas­i­ly dis­missed.

Blog­ger Jason Kot­tke watched the video with an eye toward some of the paper’s most notable design changes. His find­ings also remind us of some of the his­toric events to appear on the Times’ front page—Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion, Nixon’s res­ig­na­tion, and the elec­tion of our first Black pres­i­dent, which it described as a “nation­al catharsis—a repu­di­a­tion of a his­tor­i­cal­ly unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can pres­i­dent and his eco­nom­ic and for­eign poli­cies.”

How many of the over 50,000 front pages fea­tured above were deemed per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant enough to squir­rel away in a trunk or an attic?

Have dig­i­tal archives decreed that this prac­tice will soon gasp its last, along with the print media that inspired it?

What will we use to wrap our fish and line our bird cages?

Read the New York Times 2012 (non-front page) cov­er­age of Apple’s rejec­tion of Josh Begley’s Drone+ app here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Inac­cu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

The New York Times’ First Pro­file of Hitler: His Anti-Semi­tism Is Not as “Gen­uine or Vio­lent” as It Sounds (1922)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in New York City.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is play­ing at The Brick in Brook­lyn through tomor­row night. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Rock Band: Hear The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” Played with Electromechanical Instruments That Make Music with Rocks

in Music, Technology | March 15th, 2017

From Neil Men­doza comes “Rock Band,” an amal­ga­ma­tion of “electro­mechan­i­cal instru­ments that make music with rocks by throw­ing them through the air, slap­ping them and mak­ing them vibrate.” Above, hear the band play one of my favorite Bea­t­les songs, “Here Comes the Sun.” There’s no Paul, John, George and Ringo here. Instead, you’ve got the fol­low­ing band mem­bers:

Pinger — fires small rocks at alu­mini­um keys using sole­noids.
Spin­ner — launch­es mag­net­ic rocks, Hematite, at pieces of mar­ble. Rocks are launched by spin­ning mag­nets using Applied Motion applied-motion.com step­per motors.
Slap­per — slaps rocks with fake leather.
Buzzer — vibrates the plunger of a sole­noid against a piece of mar­ble.

Accord­ing to Neil, “the whole project is con­trolled by a com­put­er run­ning a MIDI play­er writ­ten in open­Frame­works talk­ing to a Teen­sy. The machines were designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inven­tor.” You can find instruc­tions on how to build your own Pinger here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via The Kids Should See This

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See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic

in Music, Technology | March 14th, 2017

In the arts, tech­nol­o­gy, or any oth­er realm, Japan­ese cul­ture encour­ages tak­ing one’s cho­sen pur­suits to the lim­its, even when their mate­r­i­al comes from oth­er cul­tures. We have here a par­tic­u­lar­ly notable exam­ple in the form of Man­darin Elec­tron, a musi­cal ensem­ble found­ed and led since 1999 by pio­neer Japan­ese theremin play­er Masa­mi Takeuchi. But its mem­bers (273 of whom set the theremin-ensem­ble Guin­ness World Record with the per­for­mance of “Amaz­ing Grace” above) don’t play quite the same touch­less, spooky-sound­ing instru­ment vin­tage elec­tron­ic music fans would rec­og­nize; instead, they mas­ter the Matry­omin, a theremin in the com­pact form of a tra­di­tion­al Russ­ian Matryosh­ka doll, con­ve­nient­ly designed “so as to dis­sem­i­nate theremin per­for­mance.”

The com­bi­na­tion isn’t quite as ran­dom as it sounds. Back in 2015 we post­ed about the his­to­ry of the theremin, which goes back to the work of a Russ­ian inven­tor named Léon Theremin. When he first devel­oped the instru­ment in 1919, he called it the Aether­phone, and in the 1920s demon­strat­ed it in Europe and the Unit­ed States.

In the decades there­after, Therem­in’s strange new musi­cal inven­tion cap­tured imag­i­na­tions all over the world, and last year Japan cel­e­brat­ed the inven­tor’s 120th Birth­day with a series of events called Theremin 120 — most of them some­how involv­ing Takeuchi. You can learn more about his his­to­ry with the theremin and its home­land from the video just above.

In a sense, Takeuchi, who moved to Rus­sia to study under Therem­in’s rel­a­tive and pupil Lydia Kavia, has real­ized the inven­tor’s orig­i­nal vision for his “instru­ment of a singing-voice kind.” Free­ing its sounds from their mid-2oth-cen­tu­ry West­ern asso­ci­a­tions — dri­ve-in hor­ror movies, nov­el­ty surf-rock — he has over­seen their trans­for­ma­tion into the ele­ments of an elec­tron­ic cho­rus. You can pur­chase your very own Man­darin Elec­tron-made Matry­omin (now on its third-gen­er­a­tion mod­el) and start learn­ing to play it with the video just above, but if its poten­tial still escapes you, have a look at Takeuchi and his ensem­ble’s exten­sive col­lec­tion of tour and media appear­ances. If the sound and sight of hun­dreds of peo­ple all tun­ing their Matryosh­ka-doll theremins at once does­n’t intrigue you, noth­ing could.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryosh­ka Dolls in Japan

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

“Some­where Over the Rain­bow” Played on a 1929 Theremin

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Technology Behind Wi-Fi & Bluetooth During WWII

in Film, History, Technology | March 13th, 2017

A cer­tain ide­al of Amer­i­ca holds that an immi­grant who arrives in that land of oppor­tu­ni­ty can, with hard work and luck, com­plete­ly remake them­selves, even into an A‑list movie star or an inven­tor of hereto­fore unimag­ined new things. Hedy Lamarr, by this reck­on­ing, ranks among the ide­al Amer­i­cans: born Hed­wig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vien­na, she arrived in Hol­ly­wood in 1938 and reigned, under her new name grant­ed by movie mogul Louis B. May­er, as per­haps the most beau­ti­ful face on the sil­ver screen for the next dozen years.

A reluc­tant star since her ear­ly role in the scan­dalous Czech film Ekstase and in Amer­i­ca nev­er quite able to escape type­cast­ing as the mys­te­ri­ous, exot­ic beau­ty oppo­site a “real” actor, the bored Lamarr occu­pied her mind by turn­ing to inven­tion.

Work­ing away at her draft­ing table instead of mak­ing the night­ly Hol­ly­wood par­ty rounds, Lamarr came up with every­thing from dis­solv­ing soda tablets to improved traf­fic sig­nals and tis­sue box­es to a “skin-taut­ening tech­nique based on the prin­ci­ples of the accor­dion.”

But her place in the canon of Amer­i­can inven­tors rests on an idea that came out of a con­ver­sa­tion with com­pos­er George Antheil. Mar­ried back in Aus­tria to arms deal­er Friedrich Man­dl, she’d over­heard con­ver­sa­tions, accord­ing to her New York Times obit­u­ary, between her then-hus­band and many Nazi-high­er ups “who seemed to place great val­ue on cre­at­ing some sort of device that would per­mit the radio con­trol of air­borne tor­pe­does and reduce the dan­ger of jam­ming. She and Antheil got to dis­cussing all this. The idea, they decid­ed, was to defeat jam­ming efforts by send­ing syn­chro­nized radio sig­nals on var­i­ous wave­lengths to mis­siles, which could then be direct­ed to hit their mark.”

Lamarr filed this inge­nious patent for a “fre­quen­cy-hop­ping” com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem in 1942, but it raised no mil­i­tary inter­est until the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis twen­ty years lat­er, when the Navy start­ed using the tech­nol­o­gy on their ships. It evolved in the decades there­after, ulti­mate­ly becom­ing an indis­pens­able ele­ment of such tech­nolo­gies in wide­spread use today as wi-fi and Blue­tooth. Hav­ing signed her inven­tion over to the mil­i­tary, Lamarr nev­er made a dime from it her­self, but in 1996, four years before she died, she did receive the Elec­tron­ic Future Foun­da­tion’s Pio­neer Award. “It’s about time,” she said when she heard the news.

More recent­ly, his­to­ri­an Richard Rhodes told the sto­ry of Lamar­r’s invent­ing life in full with the book Hedy’s Fol­ly: The Life and Break­through Inven­tions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beau­ti­ful Woman in the World. “Hedy real­ized that what she came up with was impor­tant but I don’t think she knew how impor­tant it was going to be,” said her son Antho­ny Loder. “The def­i­n­i­tion of impor­tance is the more peo­ple that it affects over the longer peri­od of time. The longer this goes on and the more peo­ple it affects the more impor­tant she will be.” Lamarr her­self, in response to praise for her con­tri­bu­tion to com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy received in her life­time, explained it as mere­ly the result of fol­low­ing her instincts: “Improv­ing things comes nat­u­ral­ly to me.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Strange Woman, the 1946 Noir Film Star­ring Hedy Lamarr

Gus­tav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Ear­li­est Explo­rations of Women’s Sen­su­al­i­ty

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Per­cus­sion­ist Mar­lon Bran­do Patent­ed His Inven­tion for Tun­ing Con­ga Drums

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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