1 00:00:26,359 --> 00:00:26,359 Picture a car parked in the balmy, leaped summer darkness of Hollywood in 1940. 2 00:00:26,359 --> 00:00:29,719 A woman stands by the windshield. 3 00:00:29,719 --> 00:00:38,039 She is, according to the studio executives who control her life, the most beautiful woman in the world. 4 00:00:38,039 --> 00:00:47,159 But right now, she's not thinking about cameras, or the agonizing 12-15-hour days at MGM. 5 00:00:47,159 --> 00:00:52,320 She is thinking about a man she just met at a dinner party. 6 00:00:52,320 --> 00:01:06,719 An avant-garde composer named George Antheil, a man who once wrote a symphony for 16 synchronized player pianos and airplane propellers. 7 00:01:06,719 --> 00:01:15,840 She takes out a tube of lipstick, and right there on the glass of his windshield, she writes her private phone number. 8 00:01:15,840 --> 00:01:26,200 When he calls the next day, they don't talk about movies, they talk about the war, they talk about torpedoes. 9 00:01:26,200 --> 00:01:29,599 Now ideas don't always travel in straight lines. 10 00:01:29,599 --> 00:01:39,519 Sometimes they are born in one mind, buried in a filing cabinet, ignored by the people who need the most, only to be rediscovered decades later by engineers who might not even 11 00:01:39,519 --> 00:01:42,799 know whose ghost they are chasing. 12 00:01:42,799 --> 00:01:48,680 The wireless technology connecting the earbuds in your head to the phone in your pocket right now. 13 00:01:48,680 --> 00:02:03,840 The technology inside 5 billion devices worldwide is one of those ideas, and it owes its existence to two wildly improbable, entirely disconnected origin stories. 14 00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:10,479 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine. 15 00:02:10,479 --> 00:02:18,560 To understand the first story, you have to know who Hedy Lamarr was before she was a movie star. 16 00:02:18,560 --> 00:02:25,080 Born Hedwig Kysler in Vienna, she dismantled and rebuilt her music box at age 5. 17 00:02:25,080 --> 00:02:33,680 By 18 she was married to Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer known as the Munitions King. 18 00:02:33,680 --> 00:02:39,960 He was pathologically controlling, keeping her like an imprisoned doll. 19 00:02:39,960 --> 00:02:45,639 But he also brought her to lavish dinners. Picture her sitting there. 20 00:02:45,639 --> 00:03:00,879 The table is set with heavy silver and crystal. Men in uniform, military contractors, fascists, sometimes Mussolini, sometimes Hitler, lean over there's their cigars. 21 00:03:00,879 --> 00:03:03,879 They don't look at her, not really. 22 00:03:03,879 --> 00:03:10,960 They look at her as a beautiful object, a trophy, but they don't see her mind. 23 00:03:10,960 --> 00:03:18,599 She's expected to be an ornament, to sit there silently, but she is listening. 24 00:03:18,599 --> 00:03:31,199 While they talk right over her about radio control torpedoes, about how easily the guidance signals can be jammed by the enemy, she is absorbing every word, and they think she 25 00:03:31,199 --> 00:03:35,080 is too stupid to understand them. 26 00:03:35,080 --> 00:03:47,280 Eventually she escaped, she fled to London, negotiated a brilliant contract with the head of MGM on a luxury liner and became Hollywood royalty. 27 00:03:47,280 --> 00:03:54,800 But in her trailer, between takes, she had an inventing table. 28 00:03:54,800 --> 00:04:06,280 In the fall of 1940, after a German U-boat torpedoed a passenger ship carrying 87 children, she decided to put her munitions education to use. 29 00:04:06,280 --> 00:04:15,759 She and George Antheil realized that if torpedoes radio guidance signals constantly hopped between frequencies, the enemy couldn't jam it. 30 00:04:15,759 --> 00:04:21,160 But how do you keep the sender and receiver perfectly synchronized? 31 00:04:21,160 --> 00:04:24,839 Anthiel remembered his player pianos. 32 00:04:24,839 --> 00:04:33,480 If you've never seen a player piano roll, imagine a long scroll of heavy paper, punched into the paper as a pattern of holes. 33 00:04:33,480 --> 00:04:42,000 As the roll unwinds inside the piano, a mechanical reader feels for those holes, triggering specific keys to strike at exact moments. 34 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:45,480 It is a pure mechanical memory. 35 00:04:45,480 --> 00:04:53,040 They realized what if you put an identical paper roll in the ship and in the torpedo? 36 00:04:53,040 --> 00:04:58,720 Start them at the exact same moment and they would unwind at the exact same speed. 37 00:04:58,720 --> 00:05:07,319 The radio signal would hop from frequency to frequency dictated by the holes in the paper in perfect unbreakable unison. 38 00:05:07,319 --> 00:05:11,040 How many frequencies? Exactly 88. 39 00:05:11,040 --> 00:05:13,759 One for every key on a piano. 40 00:05:13,759 --> 00:05:21,439 They filed a patent for a, quote, secret communication system and donated it to the US Navy. 41 00:05:21,439 --> 00:05:24,399 The Navy's response was devastating. 42 00:05:24,399 --> 00:05:26,480 They literally laughed it off. 43 00:05:26,480 --> 00:05:31,839 They said, my god, we can't put a player piano in a torpedo. 44 00:05:31,839 --> 00:05:37,639 They told the most beautiful woman in the world that she shouldn't worry her pretty head about engineering. 45 00:05:37,639 --> 00:05:47,560 They told her that if she really wanted to help the war effort, she'd be more useful using her looks to sell war bonds. 46 00:05:47,560 --> 00:05:50,240 Let that hang there. 47 00:05:50,240 --> 00:06:00,040 The sheer suffocating weight of being told that your mind is worthless, but your face might be worth a few bucks. 48 00:06:00,040 --> 00:06:01,959 Now she complied. 49 00:06:01,959 --> 00:06:12,240 With patriotic fury, she raised the modern equivalent of $343 million by smiling and flirting on stages across the country. 50 00:06:12,240 --> 00:06:15,800 Her patent was quietly filed away, ignored. 51 00:06:15,800 --> 00:06:23,759 It expired in 1959, neither she nor Antheil ever made a penny from it. 52 00:06:23,759 --> 00:06:27,040 Now cut to the fall of 1997. 53 00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:33,839 We are in a pub in Toronto, seeking shelter from the blustery freezing wind. 54 00:06:33,839 --> 00:06:35,839 Two engineers. 55 00:06:35,839 --> 00:06:42,879 Jim Kardach from Intel and Sven Mattisson from Ericsson are drowning their sorrows. 56 00:06:42,879 --> 00:06:51,040 They had just spent the day pitching their rival short-range wireless technologies to consortium and they had bombed. 57 00:06:51,040 --> 00:06:54,800 So they do what engineers do in pubs. 58 00:06:54,800 --> 00:06:57,920 They conduct a comparison of Canadian beers. 59 00:06:57,920 --> 00:06:59,800 They talk. 60 00:06:59,800 --> 00:07:08,439 Jim mentions he likes history, but admits his knowledge of Scandinavia is mostly just Vikings and horned helmets looting things. 61 00:07:08,439 --> 00:07:13,079 Sven tells him about a Swedish novel he just read, The Long Ships. 62 00:07:13,079 --> 00:07:18,800 About the reign of a 10th century Danish king named Harold Gormson. 63 00:07:18,800 --> 00:07:20,319 Harold was a builder. 64 00:07:20,319 --> 00:07:28,160 He constructed perfectly circular ringed fortresses and a 760 meter long bridge made of oak. 65 00:07:28,160 --> 00:07:36,079 But his greatest legacy was that he united the warring Danish tribes into a single centralized kingdom. 66 00:07:36,079 --> 00:07:42,519 Because of a conspicuous dark dead tooth, he earned the nickname Bluetooth. 67 00:07:42,519 --> 00:07:52,600 When Jim Kardach flew home, he opened a history book and saw a picture of a ruined stone erected by King Harold in a small town called Jelling. 68 00:07:52,600 --> 00:07:59,319 The stone said Harold, who won for himself, all of Denmark in Norway. 69 00:07:59,319 --> 00:08:04,959 Jim looked at the stone and he had a revelation. 70 00:08:04,959 --> 00:08:13,800 Just as Harold had united the warring tribes, this new technology was meant to unite the warring PC and cellular industries. 71 00:08:13,800 --> 00:08:18,480 He proposed Bluetooth as a temporary code name. 72 00:08:18,480 --> 00:08:20,480 His boss has hated it. 73 00:08:20,480 --> 00:08:22,360 Corporate marketing hated it. 74 00:08:22,360 --> 00:08:31,279 They tried to name the technology Flirt or Conductor or PAN for personal area network. 75 00:08:31,279 --> 00:08:40,399 The board even officially voted for PAN, but just before launch, a trademark search revealed PAN already had tens of thousands of hits on the internet. 76 00:08:40,399 --> 00:08:42,159 They had no backup. 77 00:08:42,159 --> 00:08:48,200 The only name legally cleared was the temporary one, Bluetooth. 78 00:08:48,200 --> 00:08:52,840 Now Hedy Lamarr did not build the microchip inside your phone. 79 00:08:52,840 --> 00:09:00,639 Engineers at Ericsson did that in the 1990s, using FCC regulations that opened up radio bands in 1985. 80 00:09:00,639 --> 00:09:11,000 But the military engineers who laid the groundwork for those signals during the Cold War were iterating on the very concept of frequency hopping spread spectrum that Lamarr and Antheil had 81 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:16,519 articulated with such vivid, elegant clarity back in 1942. 82 00:09:16,519 --> 00:09:23,600 It was a lineage of ideas passed down until the world was finally ready for them. 83 00:09:23,600 --> 00:09:37,840 When Hedy Lamarr finally received an award for her pioneering work in 1997, she was 82 years old, reclusive, living alone in Florida, and communicating with the outside world only 84 00:09:37,840 --> 00:09:40,080 by telephone. 85 00:09:40,080 --> 00:09:46,360 When they called her to say that she was finally being recognized, her response was brief. 86 00:09:46,360 --> 00:09:49,200 It's about time. 87 00:09:49,200 --> 00:09:52,080 She died in the year 2000. 88 00:09:52,080 --> 00:09:59,080 Just as the wireless revolution her ideas helped enable was taking over the globe. 89 00:09:59,080 --> 00:10:01,600 Look at your phone. 90 00:10:01,600 --> 00:10:07,120 Go to the Bluetooth settings and look at that little angular icon. 91 00:10:07,120 --> 00:10:09,240 It's a bind rune. 92 00:10:09,240 --> 00:10:15,759 It's two ancient characters from the Younger Futhark, alphabet merged together. 93 00:10:15,759 --> 00:10:16,759 Hagall, for H. 94 00:10:17,759 --> 00:10:18,759 Bjarkan, for B. 95 00:10:20,759 --> 00:10:21,759 Herald. 96 00:10:21,759 --> 00:10:22,759 Bluetooth. 97 00:10:22,759 --> 00:10:24,759 Initials. 98 00:10:24,759 --> 00:10:34,679 Stamped onto 5 billion devices is a symbol chosen on a whim in a Toronto pub honoring a 10th century king with a bad tooth. 99 00:10:34,679 --> 00:10:37,799 But somewhere inside it, it is also this. 100 00:10:37,799 --> 00:10:40,960 A woman at a drafting table in the dark. 101 00:10:40,960 --> 00:10:43,759 After a 15-hour day on a movie set. 102 00:10:43,759 --> 00:10:47,759 In a Hollywood that thought it knew exactly what she was worth. 103 00:10:47,759 --> 00:10:55,720 Figuring out how to make a signal move like fingers across 88 piano keys. 104 00:10:55,720 --> 00:10:59,759 I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Lore in the Machine.