Frequency Hopping The Patent Wiring Diagrams

In the mid-1930s during her marriage to armaments manufacturer Fritz Mandl, Hedy Lamarr must have acquired detailed and comprehensive knowledge about military technology. Since her husband forbade her to pursue her acting career, she accompanied him to meetings with his technicians and business associates, and thus gained insight into the difficult problem of remote-controlled torpedoes. For Mandl's weapons production business, though, the torpedoes' low hit rate was not necessarily a disadvantage - the more torpedoes had to be fired, the more he was able to sell. Nevertheless, for Great Britain - confronted in 1940 by the threat of a German invasion - torpedoes that could be steered with pin-point accuracy might be an advantage spelling the difference between victory and defeat. This was the fundamental consideration behind Hedy Lamarr's invention. Her revolutionary technical approach was set to not transmit the torpedo's guidance signal on a single frequency which the enemy could easily detect and jam, but rather to distribute it over numerous frequencies. The jumping back and forth between the individual frequencies occurs in fractions of a second and thus can be neither detected nor disrupted by the enemy.

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