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Lamarr was in Hollywood in 1937.

U.S. Patent Number 2,292,387, August 11th, 1942, [was awarded to Hedy Lamarr] under the name 'Hedy Keisler Markey' (her married name) and George Antheil, for a 'Secret Communications System.' Nomination for the EFF Pioneer award

Lamarr's first husband was an independent munitions maker interested in control systems whose European properties were confiscated by the Reich in 1938. George Antheil, an avant-garde composer interested in the related problem of synchronizing non-traditional "instruments" in concert performance. Advanced Weaponry of the Stars

Hitler wanted to win by bluff and before the war started, invited public figures from England and the US to see how invincible his military was.

Hitler was always alert to the propaganda value of massive displays of troops and guns and planes.

But he was not such a fool as to prematurely expose the secret technologies of jet propulsion, radar, guided missiles, the Enigma, etc., that, in the end, might prove decisive.

North Korea uses prisoners in their various prison camps to breed rabbits, which are killed for meat. (not for the prisoners, who must eat bugs, worms, raw rats, etc. in order to survive) Kang Chol-Hwan who was imprisoned with his entire family in the 'redeeemables' area of the Yodok prison camp wrote a book that describes his experiences, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang". For anyone interested in North Korean human rights, its a must read. Kang Chol-Hwan is now a reporter for the South Korean newspaper the Chosun Ilbo on North Korean affairs. He's one of the most successful North Korean refugees living in South Korea.

Most North Korean refugees who manage to escape into China lead hunted lives in a terrible limbo of exploitation, terrified that they may be returned to North Korea, where people are often executed for the crime of trying to leave the country and bringing shame upon the Dear Leader.

If you read Aquariums realize that Kang Chol-Hwan's nine years in the Yodok prison camp as a boy were in the least brutal area of the least brutal camp, the only area where people are ever released. Many are sentenced to work on secret underground projects, similar to Hitler's rocket works at Peeneemunde, that only offer death through overwork as an escape, once you go in, you never come out.

Sun Ok-Lee is a North Korean refugee living in the US who worked as a bookeeper in another slave labor camp and her account to the US House is probably the most realistic account of these camps. She is one of less than five people known to have ever left one and lived.. Thousands die each year in these camps. They work people to death. (Each person, and their fat, represents useful energy to be extracted before killing them, as you will see)

Her account is at http://ncafe.com/northkorea/SunOkLeeTestimony_w_ll us.pdf

For more info see freenorthkorea.net and some of the other web sites listed there..

People who perceive that Dell does nothing in terms of R&D are naiive[sic].

If you search the US Patent and Trademark Office database for patents with an assignee name of "Dell Products", you get 222 patents. A search for just "Dell" yields 1089 patents, at least one of which is for "Dell U.S.A." rather than "Dell Products" but is still Dell (Round Rock, Texas, and a patent on "Apparatus and method for a combination personal digital assistant and network portable device"). Searching for "Dell Computer" or "Dell Products" or "Dell USA" or "Dell U.S.A"[sic] in the "Advanced Search" page (that's an/(dell andnot ("dell computer" or "dell products" or "dell usa" or "dell u.s.a")) - there's no "not" operator, as far as I can tell, but there is "andnot", and if you try to search for "dell u.s.a." it "helpfully" removes the final ".")) found 61 patents, some of which are, alas, for "Dell U.S.A.". About 11 of those appear to be computer-related, so I'll be lazy and assume they're for some other part of Dell, leaving 50 non-Dell patents, for a grand total of 1039 Dell Computer patents.

Some of them are mechanical and electrical patents (for the parts of their equipment that don't come out of the box from Intel or Microsoft or {fill in a BIOS vendor} or {fill in your favorite Linux distribution vendor}, some are manufacturing patents (for example, 6,714,937, "System and method for virtual setup and configuration for a build-to-order computer") - i.e., the sort of stuff that their component makers wouldn't necessarily do.

A search for patents with "Apple" in the assignee name found 1813 patents, but at least one of them (6,723,044, "Abdominal retractor") isn't assigned to Apple Computer (it's Apple Medical Corporation, Marlboro, MA, USA). If you search for "Apple Computer", you get 1777 patents; if you search for "Apple" and not "Apple Computer" in the "Advanced Search" section you get 36 patents, at least one of which has Apple as one of the assignees (5,996,057, "Data processing system and method of permutation with replication within a vector register file", which is a PowerPC patent with the other two assignees being the obvious, i.e. IBM and Motorola). About 5 of those look as if they'd be Apple Computer patents, so make that a grand total of 1782 Apple Computer (or Apple+IBM+Motorola) patents.

Of course, Apple's been around longer than Dell, so let's restrict the search to, say, patents issued in 2002, 2003, or 2004, by adding "and ISD/1/1/2002->12/31/2004". Unfortunately, doing so causes the patent search engine to take Too Damn Long to search (Safari times out the request), so let's just look for patents assigned to something with "Apple" in its name in that range - oops, that times out, too. Sigh.

OK, let's try 2004 patents, with an/"apple computer" and ISD/$/$/2004 - 70 patents. an/dell and ISD/$/$/2004 yields 78 patents, most of which look Dell Computerish.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether the number of "major" patents from Apple or Dell is higher - patents can range anywhere from a patent for a new I/O bus to a patent for a minor tweak on a hinge.

And, in the "offtopic but interesting" department, note that one of the examples on the Advanced Search page is "in/newmar-julie". I was curious whether Julie Newmar actually had any patents - yup, two: 4,003,094, "Pantyhose with shaping band for cheeky derrier[sic] relief" and 3,935,864, "Brassiere". I suspect there might be a fan of the old Batman TV show hiding somewhere in the US Patent and Trademark Office's IT department.... (And, yes, I know about Hedy Lamarr and spread-spectrum communications. Unfortunately, patent 2,292,387 was issued in 1942 and is only available in scanned form.)

Pretty much proves that anyone really could patent inventions plucked from Britain after and during WW2... just goes to show ;)

"So what if I'm a janitor, I really invented the Jet Engine, god damn it"

'So how was your trip to England'

You have trouble with the idea that a beautiful woman might be smarter than an Anonymous Coward? I don't. Neither does the EFF. Finding the following at Google took less time than your whine took to type:

http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/

Sample quote: "Note: Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil's invention of spread-spectrum has recently been awarded an EFF Pioneer award. (The nomination is here) This 'weblet' is a tribute to this interesting and significant technology and to the people who are using it."

http://wireless.oldcolo.com and http://www.tapr.org/

Don't give up.. the solution to your problem is out there.. If they could wire Mongolia to the net using SS, they can certainly do the same for you..

maybe you could get an NSF grant to do this...

For some interesting historical background on spread-spectrum, check out http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html

I'll forward your post on to some other people who might have some answers..

Chris

It sounds like you are looking for something like spread spectrum technology. In terms of transmission via radio, traditionally we use narrowband methods. FM 102.1 has a big bunch of energy that is easily visible around 102.1 MHz. Even if you encrypt it you know something is there.

Spread spectrum disperses the signal across a larger bandwidth so unless you know where to look, it appears that there is only background noise. It appears there is no data at all. The receiver needs a code that matches the transmitter so the receiver can know where to find the transmitted signal.

This is the technology that is used in CDMA - Code division multiple access. The method that Qualcomm uses for PCS. There are a lot of interesting advantages that this method has over TDMA and FDMA (Time, Frequency).

The story of the "Secret Communications System" patent is truly one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard, (wouldn't it make a great film?) and a look at the patent is a real eye-opener for people who are familiar with modern digital technology.. Why? Because the design was for a digital system built with analog components..

And the person who said that Hedy and George had given their patent to the government in hopes of helping to stop Hitler was right..Hedy had seen facists and facism at close hand.. and so had my father, and they both knew what was at stake..

in spite of this, Hedy was still looked at suspiciously as an "enemy alien" by some.. :(

She was married off by her family when she was stillin her teens, and was kept virtual prisoner in Austria as a "trophy bride" of the Austrian arms magnate Fritz Mandel a few years before the war, and she literally had to drug a maid in order to flee..

While being forced to sit at the dinner table with her husband and his facist friends, who included high-ranking Nazi military officials, she built up a knowledge of military technology and carried that with her when she fled to London. (where Samuel Goldwyn, I think, gave her a ticket to the US) She met my father at a party at Janet Gaynor's house, and asked him if he could help her turn what was then a valid, but unformed idea into something that could work..(My father had a reputation in Hollywood as an experimental musician and as somebody who was familiar with the latest in technology..)

It took them about six months to do the whole process, and the patent is really interesting.

(you can see it at http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html at some point. I tried to check my site tonight and got a message saying that I had exceeded my "hard limit" ..Ive been linked to by media outlets several times, but this has never happened before..

I have my web site virtual hosted at what was until recently Best, but they were recently bought by Verio -perhaps "assimilated" is a better word..:(

(Best said that they would not turn off a site for a short anomaly like being picked "Cool Site of the Day", which is sort of like what has happened..but maybe that has changed..)

an aside...does anybody have any suggestions how to avoid this in the future?

Hedy and George never made a penny from the patent, which was really unjust, I think, because the government had classified it as "Top Secret" and made the commercial utilization of the invention difficult. Just after the patent expired, in 1960, it began to see commercial use..(in the Cuban Missle Crisis) Its now the main secure communications technology in use in Milstar, the US govt's 25 billion dollar "survivable" satellite communications system. Spread Spectrum is, in addition to being an incredibly efficient way to send data, inherently secure.. (one needs to know the code, in order to read the message..or usually, even know a message exists..)

By the way, spread spectrum holds out another possibility with startling implications.. It could be used to create a new television and/or radio broadcasting service that would be able to, in any given geographic area, accomodate the broadcast of many, many more channels of information, at higher quality, than we have now, eliminating scarcity on the airwaves and the battles over bandwidth .. Just imagine, community radio, community television, creativity, true democracy of the airwaves, and perhaps, even, no need for a license to broadcast..and no more canned satellite shows..

That possibility scares some interests tremendously. And its something worth fighting for.

They have digital radio in Europe, why not here?

Guess why...

Back to the patent:
Just a thought:
The government sat on this..Rightfully, they should have compensated Hedy and George for that, or extended the patent to make up for the years in which it was classified... I know that Hedy was poor for many years.. until quite recently actually. She lived on a small pension and basically spent time with friends and tried to live cheaply.. My father was better off in the later years of his life, I understand, but was never rich in the same way that many well-known composers were. He was quite prolific musically, writing the scores for over 60 films.. But my favorite music of his was his early pieces.. He was enamoured with the possibilities opened up by machines, which could play faster and more accurately than any human ever could..

Anyway, my father died about six weeks after I was born, so I never knew him.. But I definitely did inherit his interest in communications technology...and music..and now that I know the real story, I'm very proud of him..

Now if only I could only get my only two relatives on this planet to stop saying I'm "blackmailing" them for simply being open about my father..(Its a generational thing, I guess. my mother and father weren't married, big deal..)

By the way, thanks for an excellent site, I read it almost every day..

Chris Beaumont
chris@ncafe.com

The story of the "Secret Communications System" patent is truly one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard, (wouldn't it make a great film?) and a look at the patent is a real eye-opener for people who are familiar with modern digital technology.. Why? Because the design was for a digital system built with analog components..

And the person who said that Hedy and George had given their patent to the government in hopes of helping to stop Hitler was right..Hedy had seen facists and facism at close hand.. and so had my father, and they both knew what was at stake..

in spite of this, Hedy was still looked at suspiciously as an "enemy alien" by some.. :(

She was married off by her family when she was stillin her teens, and was kept virtual prisoner in Austria as a "trophy bride" of the Austrian arms magnate Fritz Mandel a few years before the war, and she literally had to drug a maid in order to flee..

While being forced to sit at the dinner table with her husband and his facist friends, who included high-ranking Nazi military officials, she built up a knowledge of military technology and carried that with her when she fled to London. (where Samuel Goldwyn, I think, gave her a ticket to the US) She met my father at a party at Janet Gaynor's house, and asked him if he could help her turn what was then a valid, but unformed idea into something that could work..(My father had a reputation in Hollywood as an experimental musician and as somebody who was familiar with the latest in technology..)

It took them about six months to do the whole process, and the patent is really interesting.

(you can see it at http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html at some point. I tried to check my site tonight and got a message saying that I had exceeded my "hard limit" ..Ive been linked to by media outlets several times, but this has never happened before..

I have my web site virtual hosted at what was until recently Best, but they were recently bought by Verio -perhaps "assimilated" is a better word..:(

(Best said that they would not turn off a site for a short anomaly like being picked "Cool Site of the Day", which is sort of like what has happened..but maybe that has changed..)

an aside...does anybody have any suggestions how to avoid this in the future?

Hedy and George never made a penny from the patent, which was really unjust, I think, because the government had classified it as "Top Secret" and made the commercial utilization of the invention difficult. Just after the patent expired, in 1960, it began to see commercial use..(in the Cuban Missle Crisis) Its now the main secure communications technology in use in Milstar, the US govt's 25 billion dollar "survivable" satellite communications system. Spread Spectrum is, in addition to being an incredibly efficient way to send data, inherently secure.. (one needs to know the code, in order to read the message..or usually, even know a message exists..)

By the way, spread spectrum holds out another possibility with startling implications.. It could be used to create a new television and/or radio broadcasting service that would be able to, in any given geographic area, accomodate the broadcast of many, many more channels of information, at higher quality, than we have now, eliminating scarcity on the airwaves and the battles over bandwidth .. Just imagine, community radio, community television, creativity, true democracy of the airwaves, and perhaps, even, no need for a license to broadcast..and no more canned satellite shows..

That possibility scares some interests tremendously. And its something worth fighting for.

They have digital radio in Europe, why not here?

Guess why...

Back to the patent:
Just a thought:
The government sat on this..Rightfully, they should have compensated Hedy and George for that, or extended the patent to make up for the years in which it was classified... I know that Hedy was poor for many years.. until quite recently actually. She lived on a small pension and basically spent time with friends and tried to live cheaply.. My father was better off in the later years of his life, I understand, but was never rich in the same way that many well-known composers were. He was quite prolific musically, writing the scores for over 60 films.. But my favorite music of his was his early pieces.. He was enamoured with the possibilities opened up by machines, which could play faster and more accurately than any human ever could..

Anyway, my father died about six weeks after I was born, so I never knew him.. But I definitely did inherit his interest in communications technology...and music..and now that I know the real story, I'm very proud of him..

Now if only I could only get my only two relatives on this planet to stop saying I'm "blackmailing" them for simply being open about my father..(Its a generational thing, I guess. my mother and father weren't married, big deal..)

By the way, thanks for an excellent site, I read it almost every day..

Chris Beaumont
chris@ncafe.com

Hedy Lamarr's patent partner, George Antheil, was also no slouch at premature applications of future technologies. His riot-inciting work, Ballet Mécanique required sixteen synchronized player pianos to sound right. This wasn't technically possible until 1991, and first performed correctly in 1999 so perhaps the "George Antheil award for premature killer apps" is in order too... Anyway we geeks will miss you, Hedy!

The first computer coders were women. Check your history of computers: they were initially coded by connecting wires in a switchboard configuration. Who do you think did that work?

Hedy Lamarr (besides being a sex symbol) helped design and patent spread-spectrum wireless technologies that were half a century ahead of their time. If you have a PCS phone or 802.11 networking (among other products), you have her to thank.

There are lots of female pros in even the modern sysadmin game. 2 of my most prized sysadmin books were either written (ORA's Unix System Administration) or co-written (USAH, or the Red Book) by women.

Think before you speak.

Your Working Boy,