Lipstick and Runes

Look at your phone settings. There's a small angular icon there that you've probably never thought about much. It's a bind rune showing two characters from the ancient Younger Futhark alphabet, fused together. It's on billions of devices worldwide.

How that symbol ended up there is two stories, separated by half a century, that have no business belonging together. One starts with a Hollywood actress listening at a dinner table full of fascists. The other starts with two engineers bombing a pitch meeting and ending up in a Canadian pub.

In this episode

• Hedy Lamarr - after the cameras and the dinner parties
• The patent - a collaboration and what the Navy said about it
• Two engineers in a pub - a failed pitch meeting and a conversation about Vikings and a Danish king

Episode Music:

• "Morning Bell" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Noctivagant (Orchestral Version)" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Moonlit Skyline" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0

Transcript

Speaker: 0:26

Picture a car parked in the balmy, leaped summer darkness of Hollywood in 1940. A woman stands by the windshield. She is, according to the studio executives who control her life, the most beautiful woman in the world. But right now, she's not thinking about cameras, or the agonizing 12-15-hour days at MGM. She is thinking about a man she just met at a dinner party. An avant-garde composer named George Antheil, a man who once wrote a symphony for 16 synchronized player pianos and airplane propellers. She takes out a tube of lipstick, and right there on the glass of his windshield, she writes her private phone number. When he calls the next day, they don't talk about movies, they talk about the war, they talk about torpedoes. Now ideas don't always travel in straight lines. 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 know whose ghost they are chasing. The wireless technology connecting the earbuds in your head to the phone in your pocket right now. 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. I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine. To understand the first story, you have to know who Hedy Lamarr was before she was a movie star. Born Hedwig Kysler in Vienna, she dismantled and rebuilt her music box at age 5. By 18 she was married to Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer known as the Munitions King. He was pathologically controlling, keeping her like an imprisoned doll. But he also brought her to lavish dinners. Picture her sitting there. 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. They don't look at her, not really. They look at her as a beautiful object, a trophy, but they don't see her mind. She's expected to be an ornament, to sit there silently, but she is listening. 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 is too stupid to understand them. Eventually she escaped, she fled to London, negotiated a brilliant contract with the head of MGM on a luxury liner and became Hollywood royalty. But in her trailer, between takes, she had an inventing table. 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. She and George Antheil realized that if torpedoes radio guidance signals constantly hopped between frequencies, the enemy couldn't jam it. But how do you keep the sender and receiver perfectly synchronized? Anthiel remembered his player pianos. 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. As the roll unwinds inside the piano, a mechanical reader feels for those holes, triggering specific keys to strike at exact moments. It is a pure mechanical memory. They realized what if you put an identical paper roll in the ship and in the torpedo? Start them at the exact same moment and they would unwind at the exact same speed. The radio signal would hop from frequency to frequency dictated by the holes in the paper in perfect unbreakable unison. How many frequencies? Exactly 88. One for every key on a piano. They filed a patent for a, quote, secret communication system and donated it to the US Navy. The Navy's response was devastating. They literally laughed it off. They said, my god, we can't put a player piano in a torpedo. They told the most beautiful woman in the world that she shouldn't worry her pretty head about engineering. 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. Let that hang there. The sheer suffocating weight of being told that your mind is worthless, but your face might be worth a few bucks. Now she complied. With patriotic fury, she raised the modern equivalent of $343 million by smiling and flirting on stages across the country. Her patent was quietly filed away, ignored. It expired in 1959, neither she nor Antheil ever made a penny from it. Now cut to the fall of 1997. We are in a pub in Toronto, seeking shelter from the blustery freezing wind. Two engineers. Jim Kardach from Intel and Sven Mattisson from Ericsson are drowning their sorrows. They had just spent the day pitching their rival short-range wireless technologies to consortium and they had bombed. So they do what engineers do in pubs. They conduct a comparison of Canadian beers. They talk. Jim mentions he likes history, but admits his knowledge of Scandinavia is mostly just Vikings and horned helmets looting things. Sven tells him about a Swedish novel he just read, The Long Ships. About the reign of a 10th century Danish king named Harold Gormson. Harold was a builder. He constructed perfectly circular ringed fortresses and a 760 meter long bridge made of oak. But his greatest legacy was that he united the warring Danish tribes into a single centralized kingdom. Because of a conspicuous dark dead tooth, he earned the nickname Bluetooth. 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. The stone said Harold, who won for himself, all of Denmark in Norway. Jim looked at the stone and he had a revelation. Just as Harold had united the warring tribes, this new technology was meant to unite the warring PC and cellular industries. He proposed Bluetooth as a temporary code name. His boss has hated it. Corporate marketing hated it. They tried to name the technology Flirt or Conductor or PAN for personal area network. 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. They had no backup. The only name legally cleared was the temporary one, Bluetooth. Now Hedy Lamarr did not build the microchip inside your phone. Engineers at Ericsson did that in the 1990s, using FCC regulations that opened up radio bands in 1985. 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 articulated with such vivid, elegant clarity back in 1942. It was a lineage of ideas passed down until the world was finally ready for them. 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 by telephone. When they called her to say that she was finally being recognized, her response was brief. It's about time. She died in the year 2000. Just as the wireless revolution her ideas helped enable was taking over the globe. Look at your phone. Go to the Bluetooth settings and look at that little angular icon. It's a bind rune. It's two ancient characters from the Younger Futhark, alphabet merged together. Hagall, for H. Bjarkan, for B. Herald. Bluetooth. Initials. 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. But somewhere inside it, it is also this. A woman at a drafting table in the dark. After a 15-hour day on a movie set. In a Hollywood that thought it knew exactly what she was worth. Figuring out how to make a signal move like fingers across 88 piano keys. I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Lore in the Machine.