The American Physical Society recently posted an article that resonated with my theme on technology persuasion. It turns out that the seductive actress Hedy Lamarr once applied for and received a patent for a Secret Communication System that used an early type of spread spectrum mixing. She subsequently took on the role of a technologist trying to persuade decision makers to fund her idea. She encountered the usual suspects.
If your first question is, “Who is Hedy Lamarr?” then permit a brief introduction. Hedy Kiesler was born in Vienna in 1914. At the age of 20 she married Friedrich Mandl, an arms merchant whose lavish parties were graced by no less than Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. She participated in her husband’s business meetings and learned a great deal about guided torpedoes and radio-controlled weapons. She had a love for mathematics and an uncanny ability to put technology ideas together. She also was drop-dead gorgeous and irresistibly alluring. Actor George Sanders said she was “so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into the room.”
Not being overly disposed to the institution of marriage, Lamarr disguised herself as one of her maids, made her escape to Paris, and divorced Mandl. In London, she was signed on to MGM as an actress under the name of Hedy Lamarr. She would eventually made 36 movies and star in films like Ziegfield Girl and Samson and Delilah. Photographs of her show an extremely interesting woman.
In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and set in motion the machinery that would bring about the second world war and cause the death of more than 60 million people.
While Hitler was rolling his Blitzkrieg across Europe, what was the technology like in the entertainment field, on the stage where Lamarr worked?
One of their problems was to choreograph a large musical, all of which had to be done in real time. A very complex scene from one movie required the synchronization and simultaneous playing of 16 player pianos. Each of these player pianos used a paper roll that played the piano keys as the roll was rotated by a motor and fed across a reader. There are 88 keys on the keyboard so the roll provided for that many rows of perforations, plus an additional mechanism for synchronizing the 16 pianos.
Lamarr came up with the ingenious idea of using this technology for guided torpedoes and dirigibles.
Her idea was to spin a roll at high speed and thereby digitally create 88 different “frequencies,” one on each row. (These did not have to be sine-wave frequencies, just digital signals.) The transmitter and the receiver, in this case the ship and launched torpedo, would each have all 88 frequencies. The synchronized pair would hop frequencies while in transit. Decryption by the enemy was virtually impossible, certainly not in the several seconds needed to implement countermeasures. Using digital frequencies and simultaneous band-hopping was ingenious, techniques still broadly in use today in the telecommunications industry.
Lamarr filed for a patent in June, 1941. 
Seven months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed. The patent was awarded in August, 1942.
Her next problem was to convince the military to use her invention. Here, she faced the same problem as all technologists – convincing non-technical decision makers to invest and implement. The US Navy declined to implement her invention because they felt the clockwork mechanism was too bulky and unreliable to use in a torpedo. (The idea was picked up in 1957 by the Sylvania Company, but they used the recently invented transistor instead of the roll of paper.)
Perhaps the Navy was correct in their assessment, but clearly they were dissuaded by being able to see Lamarr only as the sexually charming actress and not as a mathematician capable of ingenuity. Lamarr once remarked, “My face has been my misfortune. It is a mask I cannot remove. I must live with it. I curse it.” Those are strong words, but they emphasize how difficult it is to get around stereotypes. I am certain that when the US Navy reviewed her idea, they talked more about her phenomenal beauty than about her intellect and invention. Their mistake.
Another quote from Lamarr regarding her beauty was, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Again, the Navy may have been correct in not implementing her idea, but the situation brings home a point I emphasize in my book, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers (due out the end of August). That problem is that technology wizards are stereotyped. In the case of Lamarr, she was stereotyped as being a beautiful and charming actress; she could not possibly know about weapons, mathematics, or technology.
Most technologists are not plagued with her share of beauty or charm, but they are inappropriately stereotyped, nonetheless. No matter how much you know about business, once you put up that first equation, once you mouth that first acronym, once you explain using any technical terms whatsoever, you are stereotyped as a technology nerd. Reality exits.
It is important, then, that technologists make every effort to sidestep the stereotyping. You cannot extirpate it, but you can mitigate it and not make it the fatal distraction. The recommendations in my book will make a huge difference in your persuasive results.
Lamarr serves an example of the difficulty, though, of trying to persuade decision makers to enable and enact your technology recommendations.
The wonderful and beautiful Hedy Lamarr left us January 19, 2000.