 She studied history, American studies, Japanese studies in Berlin, in Tokyo, in Graz, and also in Vienna. And when I asked her, she said, kind of everywhere. So it's her third talk on the Chaos Communication Congress. She was here three years ago and two years ago. And we are very happy to have her back. Please welcome her. Thank you. Oh, I'm on. That's good. I would have taken that screwdriver, but okay, it's too bad. Well, thank you all for being here. I hope you're all having a good time so far. It's day three and I'm having a good time. It's a very good Congress. This year, unfortunately, it's been hard for some people to actually be here. It's been a nightmare to buy tickets online. So in addition, I'd like to welcome everybody watching the stream from at home or Congress everywhere. So thank you for watching. Anyone of you watching this from at home or anyone of you who has some sort of cell phone, mobile device connected to the Congress Wi-Fi has actually been using a spread spectrum technology in the past couple of days. But this is not a talk about spread spectrum technology. Oh, and I wanted to give a hint to the translations team in German. That's Band Spreitzverfahren. And je suis désolé, je ne sais pas what it means in French. So this is not what I want to talk about because I would never pretend to be an electrical engineer or a fully trained computer scientist who is qualified to explain this very complex technology. What I want to do is tell you a story, give you a short 20-minute overview of a person, a remarkable person who worked on the development of spread spectrum technology about 75 years ago and until recently was not recognized for her accomplishments. Let's say you are an electrical engineer or you are a computer scientist and you want to learn about this technology, I try to avoid saying it because it's such a tongue twister and I'm going to stumble over the spread spectrum. So you go to your library and you find lots of big handbooks, handbook on spread spectrum communication for example. And they usually have sort of an introduction with something like this. Never mind if you can't read it right now, I've uploaded my slides so you can look at it later and I'll also explain anything that's important. This is from an Austrian handbook. And of course it mentions Claude Shannon in 1948 publishing a mathematical theory of communication, a very important paper and before that actually it mentions in 1942 Markey and Antile are patenting the first spread spectrum system ever. So you're wondering who is Markey and Antile, probably some guys at MIT, right, working for the military in 1942 developing secret weapons, could be. So ladies and gentlemen, this is Markey. Hedwig Kiesler born in 1914 in Vienna, she was a beautiful child. She was 16 when she decided to quit school and become an actress. She started hanging around the Sasha film studio in Vienna. She also stalked famous director Max Reinhardt until he cast her in his play The Weaker Sex. She had a couple more minor roles, she played Sissi, she played Opposite Heinz Rühmann. And it was Max Reinhardt who promoting his play coined the phrase, Hedwig Kiesler is the most beautiful woman in the world and the press picked it up very quickly. Then when she was 18 she did something very daring, she starred in a Czech film called Ecstasy. It's very interesting, please ask me about it or watch it on YouTube. There was full frontal nudity and she faked the first onscreen orgasm. The film was banned, the pope denounced it and Hedwig became famous. But then after Ecstasy, surprisingly Hedwig stopped acting and she married this guy. He became the young trophy wife of Fritz Mandl. He was at that time the third richest man in Austria. He was the owner of the Hilton Berger Ammunition Factory. He was also an Austro-fascist. He supplied weapons to a lot of unsavory individuals and organizations. And as his beautiful young trophy wife she was supposed to be there at parties, at meetings with important industrialists, weapons dealers, politicians and to just stand there and look beautiful. But she also listened when they spoke about developments, about German glide bombs being tested and developed. She listened and she noticed. After a couple of years for whatever reason I think Mandl was pretty controlling and then jealous for one reason or another Hedwig left him and used her Ecstasy fame to go to the US and get a contract at MGM in 1937. Her first film in the US was Algiers. And this film established her fame, her new look, her hairstyle and this very distant kind of unsmiling style that MGM had in mind for her. And they also promoted her as the most beautiful woman in the world. She usually agreed that she could not act but oh my God she's so beautiful who cares. She, actually she was not just beautiful. She was also bored with acting because usually working for a studio you made like two movies a year which took a couple weeks and the rest of the time well there was no Netflix. So she didn't like to party that much. She read, she painted and she always invented little gadgets at home. And she also worried of course at that time. She worried about the war going on in Europe she had she was an immigrant after all. She had friends and family still in Europe and oh yeah it's just a couple that's Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart. And then she was Delilah in Samsung and Delilah, Technicolor. Yeah, anyway she worried and yeah that's a fun tweet I found the feeling when you're 3,000% done with glam photo shoots and are inwardly planning a new radio frequency system for torpedoes. I like it. So that's what she started doing because she remembered what she had picked up she knew about German bombs being controlled by radio she knew that Germany was using 18 different frequencies for their glide bombs and usually dispatching 18 bombs at a time. So the enemy would have to jam every single frequency and at least one would get through. So especially in 1940 when Germany started sinking English ships in September 1940, 77 children who were being evacuated to Canada died. She offered her knowledge about weapons to the Navy. She thought about offering it because she had an idea. These German glide bombs they were radio controlled. So why not make torpedoes with radio controlled to increase their chances of hitting targets and not just going in a straight line and maybe hitting something or not. Her second idea was to use just really, really short signals just split seconds radio signals between the ship, the torpedo and the plane overhead in between longer intervals of radio silence. And then her idea was changing the frequency of the split second signal making it harder to intercept and jam. She just said okay let's just use a lot of frequencies and hop. She called it frequency hopping. But of course the question is how to do that. And here's where that second name mentioned in the pattern comes in. This is George Anteil. He was from New Jersey. In the 1920s he moved to Berlin and then to Paris and became famous as an avant-garde composer and pianist. Here's another one. His most famous composition was the Ballet Mechanique in 1924 where he tried to synchronize 16 player pianos and he also used airplane propellers and sirens. You can also watch it on the internet. Listen to it. It's crazy. It was the score for a movie actually. So he knew about synchronizing mechanical instruments when he met Hedy in 1940 at one of those Hollywood parties. And they started working together on their secret communication system which they proposed to the National Inventors Council in 1941. Here he is. There's the tall one is Hedy. And on the right is George. And the woman in the striped dress is George's wife. So their secret communication system suggested using 88 frequencies because there are 88 keys on a piano. It was just a little in-joke. And hopping between them synchronizing the sender, the transmitter and the receiver. In addition, using random signals on three extra frequencies to just make some noise. So you have 88 frequencies and you're hopping on some with the signal. You're sending one signal there, one signal here. And then you're sending random signals that don't mean anything. And if the enemy actually manages to intercept one of these frequencies, there would be like just one blip. And it wouldn't make any sense. What I want to just quickly talk about is this. So this is what they thought might happen. Here's an American ship going there dispatching a torpedo that would usually go here. Here's a German ship. And it doesn't go in a straight line because it's trying to evade the torpedo. Here's a plane. And the plane is watching and messaging the ship that the torpedo needs to change its course. And the ship is messaging the torpedo, go left, go right, go left, go right, go left. And then boom. For synchronization between the sender and the receiver, they suggested using these paper ribbons with punch holes, just like in those mechanical pianos that Anteil used to be familiar with. Oh, here's actually a notebook that they used for the mechanism that was supposed to make the sender and the receiver go off at the same time so they would be synchronized. The New York Times picked it up. And like they said, the National Inventors Council actually was positive, liked the idea and suggested that they should patent this. The U.S. Patent Office awarded them the patent. But the Navy rejected it eventually. The Navy said it's too bulky, it's too big, we can't make this. But the question is why. The Navy actually thought, because they had said they wanted to use these paper ribbons, just like in a piano, and they were like, we can't put a piano in a torpedo. Are you crazy? It's not going to work. In fact, it would have been much smaller, of course. And then there was the issue of a Hollywood star known for her beautiful face and a crazy composer inventing a weapon system, I don't think so. Then again, the timing was kind of bad. Right after Pearl Harbor, the Navy was in shock and busy fixing their existing torpedo system because in 1942, about 60% of American torpedoes were duds. They exploded too soon, they didn't explode at all, they went anywhere, and so the Navy was like, okay, we got to fix this and we can't really develop anything new right now. And then one point that I've been thinking about is Hedy at that point was still technically an enemy alien. She wasn't naturalized until 1953. So there's obviously always the question of loyalty, I think. Instead, it was suggested that she should help the war by selling war bonds, which she did very successfully. She sold $7 million of war bonds in one day, which is in today's money about $100 million. She also served cake at the famous Hollywood Contine. But her patent seemed to have been forgotten. It ran out in 1959. She never got anything from it, she never got any financial gain, nothing, but in fact there was secret military research on this topic from the 1940s until the 1970s. It was classified. The first time spread spectrum technology was used by the military was in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A system called Blades was installed in ships in the Caribbean and later also in the Mediterranean Sea. This system using frequency hopping spread spectrum was the only one that could not be jammed at that point. Civil use of this technology came much, much later. In the 1970s, 1980s when the FCC started with a deregulation of frequencies and allowed civil use of various frequencies in, let's say, microwaves, mobile phones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, et cetera, et cetera, it actually started being used in the civil sector. In the early 1990s, Dave Hughes, who's known as an internet pioneer, came across Haiti, researched her patent and lobbied for her recognition for the first time. He got her nominated for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, which she was awarded in 1979, 1997. She was 82 years old. She didn't leave the house anymore. Her son went there and got that award on her behalf and supposedly she was very happy about it that she finally got some recognition. In the past 10 years, especially in Austria, there has been at last more recognition of Haiti. There was an exhibition around the country. The Austrian Republic awards the Haiti Lamar Award for Achievements by Women in Information Technology and Vienna named a street after Haiti. Her birthday is now Inventor's Day. In the United States, she was finally inducted in the National Inventor's Hall of Fame two years ago. Well, I've been trying to speak just 20 minutes, giving you an overview of this, I think, remarkable person who should get much more recognition than she did. I think I've been a bit faster, actually. That's good. I'm hoping that maybe I've been able to inspire some interest in this person and maybe inspire someone to read up on her or maybe watch her movies. Sadly, she's been all but forgotten. Her career was big and very short. And then she lived on for decades. She was forgotten. Her inventions were forgotten. So I'm hoping that maybe you'd like to look at some sources, watch some movies. You could contact me. I have some really good books that I read on her that I would recommend. And that would be good. That would make me very happy because doing research on Haiti was fun. She kind of developed a relationship to a person like that, and I like her. She was considered difficult as a woman, as an actor. But I think she was considered difficult for doing things that any man would have been considered, yeah, he's a strong guy, and he knows what he wants, and he does what he wants. She was always doing things her own way. She came to America on her own alone. She made her way. She was basically, you could say she was a refugee. I mean, she came with a contract, but she couldn't go back. Austria was gone. There was war. She always missed it. And she had to make her own way. She had to fight for a place in life. And she always tried to find happiness. Unfortunately, she didn't really find it. And so in closing before we can have a couple of minutes for questions, I hope, I'd like to ask you to give a hand to Hedy. Thanks a lot, Anja, for this very nice talk. We have a couple of minutes for questions and answers. So if you have something that you would like to know, please feel free to go to the mics. There's something going on online, I think. Okay. Yes, thank you. I ask you would like to know, are there any competitive stories where a non-technic technic people or person contributed to technology? I'm not sure. Is there another Hedy? Oh, another Hedy. I'm pretty sure there is. I can't come up with any example right now, but maybe someone does, because there are so many people, especially women, who are being overlooked for what they're doing, like she was. I'm sorry, I can't really come up with any examples right now, but especially when it comes to women, it's still, sadly, it's still so hard for women to be recognized in a technological field like a man would. There's always, maybe especially when you're this pretty, nobody thinks that there's anything behind this pretty face. And I don't know, I would like, if anyone has an example, that would be great. I'm sure there's a lot of people who are another Hedy. I think the person on microphone was nodding to that, but you have a question there, right? Yeah, that actually kind of covered my question, but I just first of all wanted to thank you so much for doing this talk. And also maybe to sort of respond to you, I think one of the things we could think about is not only women, but also people, particularly in what we still call the global South who are doing amazing work that doesn't get recognized. And we come to conferences and there's often times a lot of, not a lot of communication between developers in those places. So I think it's very likely that's where our next Hedy Lamar could come from. So that being said, I do have a question for you, which is what can everybody here do to try to help avoid this? How can we think outside the box and be reaching out to people and maybe uncovering hidden work and sort of breaking the mold? Because that's what happened to her. Like she got stuck in this structure that existed by thinking outside the box. I think by supporting not just girls from an early age, you know, to just not look at this gender stereotypes, you know, you have a girl. And so, yeah, she can't be interested in technology. She should just be open and be open to anyone who's, you know, asking questions, who wants to learn and support that. It's really awesome to see so many little girls here, too. Yes. Thanks to all the parents who are doing that. We have one more question online. Yes, thank you. Can you elaborate a little bit on her formal education? Was there anything else than normal school? Yes. Well, you know, she was born in 1914. She went typically a girl of her status. She was from a well-off family. Her dad was a banker. Went to like a girl's school, which she did. But as far as I've read up, her dad actually supported her learning. He taught her a lot. He took her, he took her hiking. He told her how technical apparatuses work. And he always, he supported her learning a lot. But then again, she had the typical formal education of a girl of her age and status. And when she was 16, she was at a finishing school in Switzerland, Switzerland, and she ran away because she wanted to be an actress. So I guess it was not that challenging. It was nothing that really interested her in that school. I'm guessing girls, they learned how to be a good wife. How to, you know, know enough so that you're not too boring for your future husband. That was the goal of educating girls. We got another question on Mike One. Hi, I would like to thank you for this talk as well. And for the intervention, just on microphone number two. I would want to know, I would like to know what led you to researching Hedi's life and how did you stumble upon this personality? Because as you said yourself, it's hard to, I mean, if they're not recognized, how do you find her at all? Thank you. So how did I find her? I found her last year. I had never, ever heard of her. Never seen any of her movies. Somebody on Twitter, who I follow, posted a link about her, like an article online about her inventions. And I read that and I thought, wow, that's interesting. Who is that? And then I just started googling her and in the end I started buying all these books and reading and watching her movies. And I'm really happy about that, because as I said, I really like her. So yeah, Twitter. I think, ah, there's someone at mic six. Yeah, I wasn't sure, because you sat down again. So please ask your question now. I'm not sure you said like, or the name of the talk was the woman behind Wi-Fi. Can you explain the title and her position and what was made out of her theory? Yeah, I chose that title because a lot of articles, there's a lot of short mentions of her online and they often stress that, yeah, she was one of the pioneers of these technologies that eventually led to today's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And there's still always this discussion. When somebody says, well, yeah, she invented Wi-Fi, which I wouldn't say because she didn't, but she was one of many pioneers working on this technology the past decades. And there's still always kind of misogynistic backlash when somebody recognizes her achievement and people are always, yeah, well, it's so different Wi-Fi and spread spectrum today from what she did and she didn't really, well, she didn't really do anything. It's not that important and that's still today. And I think it is important what she did. She was ahead of her time. She thought about something that scientists during that time could not grasp. It was possible. Her patent was feasible. And to answer your question, it's kind of a little provocative, maybe, the title intentionally to just make you think about what exactly did she do, which is not that little, I think. I think regardless of a provocative title, it was a really amazing talk and we would like to thank you one more time. And goodbye. Okay.