As a high school student about 1945 I wondered what it was that was
being passed around the classroom.  When it got to me, it looked like
a tiny key-chain telescope.  Putting it to my eye I was amazed to see
a tiny image of Hedy in a wonderfully natural pose.  (Probably the
first nude pic I had ever seen!)

The San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles) Daily News today carried the
Knight Ridder Newspapers story of her amazing invention helping to
invent the cellular telephone. (Author: Carrie Rickey.)  And, of
course, her death Wednesday.

Re-reading the article in The AMICA Bulletin Vol. 34, Number 2 of
March/April 1997, and studying the patent drawings left me wondering,
as a radio amateur just how much electronic background she and
co-inventor George Antheil had.

Hedy Lamarr's passing jolted my memory in more ways than one.

In 1942 my brothers and I took piano lessons with a Mrs. Oats of the
Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, but while my brothers were pounding
away in her home I was visiting her husband in his garage.

He showed my his prospecting device, a radio transmitter (designed at
a frequency of about 56 MHz), and a receiving loop antenna on a tripod.
A meter would measure the returned signal from, hopefully, an ore
deposit in the side of a mountain.  He showed me photographs of the
set-up somewhere in the Owens Valley of California, I believe.  He was
waiting for the end of the war to resume activities.  He and the son of
an earlier piano teacher led me to my interest in amateur radio.

He and an un-named partner had invented radar, but wartime radio
silence kept him from developing it further, and I believe he had no
inkling of what he had.

John Spradley

 [ RADAR is an acronym: RAdio Detecting And Ranging, invented near the
 [ beginning of WW2 by ingenious UK ham radio experimenters.  The US
 [ immediately pursued further development and, near the end of the war
 [ in the Pacific, Japanese defense forces were using it too.  -- Robbie