Posted on 03/08/2018 12:25:24 PM PST by nickcarraway
Isn't it hard to believe how a beautiful actress wasn't taken seriously as the genius inventor that she was?
Along with digital video and consumer drones — cf. this week’s Leaning into the Wind — one of the greatest boons to documentaries over the past decade has been previously unheard recordings of deceased people, the latest beneficiary being Alexandra Dean’s excellent Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Tapes of Lamarr from 1990 are among the primary source for exploring her life, which was a prime example of how it’s not always easy being the best at something — and when you’re the best at having an aesthetically pleasing face, it can make it all the more difficult to be taken seriously in other departments. (To some, she’s the source of a running joke about Harvey Korman’s character’s name in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, hence Brooks being Bombshell’s first on-screen interviewee, followed by the Saddles gag in question.)
The fact that she appeared naked in the famously racy, pre-code film Ecstasy made it all the more difficult for men to believe she could be smart. Even though her big brain came up with the basic structure of what later became wifi during World War II, her innovations were ignored at the time because she was a pretty lady. One shudders to think how much worse it would have been if she were blonde. Because they’re dumb!
Not rated.
Opens Friday at the Clay Theater.
She had to flee her native Austria disguised as a made, because of her Jewish ethnicity, I wouldn’t exactly call that a picnic.
Heh, just came back into the thread, giggled again!
She enjoyed travel. Countless times she took off with friends, Bob and Bing. All the more mystifying as the three did so by road rather than air.
One smart cookie. The favs from that era are many. Rita, Maureen, Myrna, Lauren. These nostalgic films are missed by many.
Really old news...
Fritz Mandl (m. 1933–37; divorced)
Gene Markey (m. 1939–41; divorced; 1 child)
John Loder (m. 1943–47; divorced; 2 children)
Teddy Stauffer (m. 1951–52; divorced)
W. Howard Lee (m. 1953–60; divorced)
Lewis J. Boies (m. 1963–65; divorced)
You must be very proud of yourself.
I dont know about all this to pretty/
not taken seriously stuff. Specify circuits and principles and it ought to grab any big brain who reads it.
Very sad.
I don't know of a movie in which she looked better.
During WWII, she sold a single kiss for $10,000 to raise money for the USO.
I don't blame the Navy, there were so many things of this nature going on, some panned out, some didn't, and in her case the development of frequency hopping to prevent jamming (which is now used in all cell phone communications) really had to wait for technology to catch up to it to make it valuable. It was kind of developed in a vacuum...almost like "when the pupil is ready to learn, the teacher will arrive" kind of thing.
There was a really funny (to me at least) situation outlined by Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project. He was a bit of a wise guy (just a bit!) and the military oversight had them sign over all their ideas that could be patented to the government, and the government by law would have to pay them. In the paper they all signed, it stipulated in very fine and small writing that the US Government would pay them 1 dollar for a patent to comply with the law. (Apparently, they couldn't just...TAKE them!)
Everybody just signed it and never read it. Except of course, Feynman.
So, all these bigwigs in physics and stuff were going so fast, developing things, and patents were being applied almost as fast as they could pump them out.
But since nobody ever read the fine print on that paper they signed except Feynman, nobody ever got their dollar per patent from General Groves.
One day, Feynman suddenly remembered it (probably bored) and goes in one day to General Grove's office and says he wants a dollar for one of his patents, and the General (I think it was General Groves, but might have been a lower level officer) says something like "Gee. Nobody ever asked for their money. We don't really have a fund set up. I don't know what to tell you. I'll look into it."
So Feynman went into the office every day, asking for his dollar, until the guy finally exploded, pulled out his wallet and handed him a dollar. "HERE! Now leave me alone!"
So, Wise Guy Feynman goes to the candy store, buys a dollar's worth of penny candy, comes into the work area conspicuously eating the candy and handing it out to people, and they all begin to ask where he got the candy, so he tells them that they pay a dollar for every patent. Next thing he knows, they are all lined up outside the guy's door, asking for their patent dollar!
Another funny related aspect to it, after the war, when he was a professor, Feynman got a phone call from a big aircraft manufacturer in California. He wanted Feynman to go to work for them, they were working on a big project, and he was just the guy they were looking for, and would pay huge money for him. He was puzzled, and said "I'm a physicist...I don't know anything about aircraft design. Why are you asking me?" He was very puzzled. Then the guy said "Well, there is a patent here for a nuclear powered plane, and your name is one of the names on it." Then he remembered. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, they called each one of them in for an interview, and had them brainstorm on things that the technology they were developing might be used for. They told them they were going to get patents on all of them, and his name could be on the patent as a contributor.
Being the kind of guy he was, he said things like "Well, you could have a nuclear source heat water to run a turbine, and it would make the screw drive the ship. Or you could put it in an airplane to drive a propeller to make a nuclear plane!" He thought of as many things as he could, just rolling them off his tongue like this, and the guy is furiously taking notes trying to keep up!
The guy at the California aircraft manufacturer was looking at the patent for a nuclear powered plane, and saw Feynman's name on it as a contributor!
LOL, I admit I would have been, but dammit, there is always someone faster on the trigger!
Based on this thread, the collective mentality on fr is lower than that of Obama.
Hey, Marv...
You have a stick up your bum and it makes you seem to be rather a prick.
Heh, oh man. Just love those movies! Sigh, I must be getting older.
Soon, when I say how much I like them, it will be like the old guys when I was a kid who talked about how much they liked the Marx Brothers movies...:)
Don’t be so harsh, MarvinSimpson! It’s all good...we can have fun and learn some things at the same time.
I never knew Hedley...er...Hedy Lamarr had that many husbands! (made me wonder if any of those deaths were ever investigated...:)
What did she do, make him walk to school?
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