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Summer Reading: Hedy Lamarr's CDMA Story
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
August is recognized internationally as a month to relax and appreciate summer. For a great combination of electronics industry history and entertainment, pick up Spread Spectrum: Hedy Lamarr and the Mobile Phone, by Rob Walters. Published in 2006 by BookSurge Publishing, the book chronicles movie star Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil's collaboration on a 1942 patent for mobile communications in naval weaponry. The technology became the basis of a computer chip synchronization technology, "frequency hopping," or code division multiple access (CDMA).
Cell phones use CDMA and the group of technologies birthed from it spread spectrum as a standard for mobile communications. As Antheil and Lamarr each wrote autobiographies in their time, Walters wisely focuses on the impact their lives had on shaping telecommunications in our era. He also delves into the lives of inventors that paved the way for wireless communications, through discovery and manipulation of radio waves.
Admittedly, the biographical writing can be choppy at times, which may be explained by Walters' background in telecommunications technology. His descriptions of technologies flow much more smoothly and lay out a better path to understanding than those chronicling the lives of the Hollywood starlet and the "bad boy" piano player. Anyone that was captivated by the radio communications from beyond the grave in Kurt Vonnegut's "Thanosphere" a similarly thrilling, fictional account of radio waves would enjoy the mystical yet nonfiction impact of wireless communications on the human experience. Frequency hopping, noise modulation, digital transmissions, and other facts of the radio-based wireless world come alive with as much nuance and personality as the inventors in the story. Think Time Magazine for electronic components.
As for the cast of characters with little technological background, the content of their lives is fascinating enough to keep you reading through the end. Riotous concerts in Paris, the first nude scene in a movie, international weapons scandals perpetrated by Lamarr's first husband these tumultuous lives surround everything from missile guidance to the mobile phone in your pocket. Walters makes some bold statements of his own, asserting that "war stimulates technological development." The widespread applications of wireless technologies, for both military and peaceful aims, attests to this.
Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and Lamarr August 11th, 1942. The path from theoretical radio-controlled torpedoes to cellular technology spans many more decades, with commanding performances by major inventors, military labs, and the fledgling telecom giants like Qualcomm and AT&T. Through analogies (everything from a radio family tree to advent calendars), anecdotes, and liberal biographical chronicles, Walters summarizes the history of radio, the history of mobile telecom, from a technological and social view. The birth of silicon transistors, broadband, information theory Walters puts together the story like pieces of a puzzle rather than a chronological timeline of evolution. Not surprisingly, mobile telephony has been driven by power consumption, signal quality, form factor, and status consumer demand for the hottest new product right from the start.
What better way to keep one foot in the office and one on the beach than to combine the evolution of telecommunications with the starlet from Samson and Delilah and Come Live With Me? As Walters puts it, "the story of spread spectrum brought together beauty, brains, brilliance, and a great deal of quirkiness."
Meredith Courtemanche, managing editor