From a San Francisco wire story in 1997

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The next time you pick up a cellular phone, give a brief thought to the improbable woman who first patented some of its underlying technology 55 years ago -- "the most beautiful girl in the world," actress Hedy Lamarr. The sultry, sophisticated brunette star of such hits as "Samson and Delilah" was the racy stuff of dreams for hundreds of thousands of men who marched off to war.

But there's another side to this pinup image. The sensuous star had an inquiring intellect and an engineering bent that in another era might have taken her not to Hollywood, but to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And though she never received an Oscar for her acting, she is about to get an award from the nation's techno-wizards, who have adopted her as one of their own.

To trace the story of Lamarr's invention, it's necessary to hark back to 1933, when the Vienna-born 19-year-old -- already famous for her sexy film "Ecstasy" -- became the trophy wife of Austrian armament manufacturer Fritz Mandl in a marriage arranged by her parents. "I was a kind of slave. When we were in Italy, I couldn't even go swimming without him being there," she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press, the first interview she has granted in 20 years.

Mandl kept her by his side as he attended hundreds of dinners and meetings with arms developers, builders and buyers. But the young Lamarr didn't just play the role of gracious hostess, she also listened and learned. After four years of marriage, with Mandl increasingly involved in deals with the Nazis, Lamarr knew she must escape. She drugged the maid assigned to guard her, crawled out a window and made her way to London.

There, she appeared on the stage, which led MGM's Louis B. Mayer to offer her a shot in Hollywood -- where she got a movie contract, a new name (she was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) and a new language. But she didn't forget the immersion course she'd been given in advanced weaponry at the side of the first of her six husbands. Filled with an abiding hatred of the Nazis and a strong sense of patriotism for her adopted country, she searched for ways to help the war effort.

In 1941, she met composer George Antheil at a Hollywood party. Dubbed "the bad boy of music," Antheil composed avant-garde, mechanistic symphonies and ballets. "Hedy didn't suffer fools gladly. George Antheil was not only a musician, but a formidable enough intellect that she could hold an intelligent conversation with him," said Dave Hughes, a Colorado researcher whose work for the National Science Foundation on wireless communication is based in part on the technology Lamarr envisioned more than a half-century ago.

Lamarr wanted to work at the newly established National Inventors Council in Washington, D.C., but was told she could do more for the fight against the Nazis by using her star status to sell war bonds. But that wasn't enough for her. An intuitive tinkerer, Lamarr said she has always been "interested in everything." "When I was a little girl, just four years old, I remember my father had a gold watch. And I asked 'Why does this in front go around, how does this work?'" she remembered.

Even in the midst of the glitter and pomp of Hollywood, she was full of ideas, including one on the radio control of torpedoes. She'd sat with Mandl as he reviewed films of field tests on torpedo systems, and now her mind began to explore ways to circumvent the jamming that kept the United States from using radio-controlled missiles against the Germans.

As one of her sons, Anthony Loder, recalls, she and Antheil "were sitting at the piano one day and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said, 'Hey, look, we're talking to each other and we're changing all the time.'" Fired up with the possibilities, they set to work the next day. "We were sitting on the floor figuring the whole thing out," she said from her home in Florida.

A simple radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to block. But what if the signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals? Anyone trying to listen in or jam it would hear only random noise, like a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver where hopping in synch, the message would come through loud and clear. The idea was Lamarr's, but Antheil, whose compositions had featured up to 14 player pianos playing simultaneously, suggested using piano rolls to make sure both sides were in synch.

Their patent for a "Secret Communication System" was granted on August 11, 1942. "I read the patent," said Franklin Antonio, chief technical officer of the cellular phone maker Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego. "You don't usually think of movie stars having brains, but she sure did." In fact, it was a brilliant idea -- so brilliant that it was years ahead of its time. "I always am," she said.

In fact, the Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clockwork mechanism controlled by paper tape too cumbersome to be implemented. It would take another 20 years, and the invention of the transistor, for the concept to be realized. Three years after the patent expired, the pair's ideas were used in secure military communication systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962.

But it was with the widespread availability of fast, cheap and small computer chips that spread spectrum really came into its own. It's still used by the military, including the U.S. government's Milstar defense communications satellite system, as well as for wireless Internet transmission and in many of the newer cellular phones. By an odd twist of fate, Lamarr's son Anthony owns a Los Angeles-based phone store. "It's in every other phone system I sell," he said.

Anthony Loder has written a screenplay about what he sees as his mother's essentially tragic life. Neither she nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the commercialization of their patent, though it is cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology. Now 84 _ by most accounts, although she says she is 82 _ she lives simply and in seclusion. ``She's been forgotten. But she contributed so much to an older generation. A lot of men fell in love with her. And now the younger generation is benefiting from the unknown creative work that she did,'' her son said.

But some of those men who fell in love with her looks turned into the men who also would make use of her ideas -- and fight to get her the recognition they felt she deserved. Robert Price, an electrical engineer in Lexington, Massachusetts, tried twice in the early 1980s -- first with a unsuccessful proposal for an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and then with a failed attempt to get her a Medal of Honor from Congress.

Next came Hughes, who champions the cause of a wireless Internet using the very spread spectrum Lamarr envisioned, is taking up the challenge. "I was a 15-year-old fussing around with a crystal radio set just trying to get a signal in 1941 and, here she was, intellectually articulating a control mechanism for torpedo guidance systems!" he said. He launched a campaign to get Lamarr and Antheil honored with an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The cause was taken up by engineers who remembered her not just from her salad days in Hollywood, but by her name on an important patent. The EFF was inundated with a blizzard of e-mail seconds for the nomination.

So on Wednesday, Lamarr and Antheil will be honored with an award for "blazing new trails on the electronic frontier" at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco. Her son will accept it on her behalf. Lamarr still doesn't suffer fools gladly. Informed of the award, her reaction was blunt. "It's about time."