An Irishman's Diary

IN LATER LIFE, the actress Hedy Lamarr lamented that her beauty had been a “curse”. It’s a problem many of us can identify with, God knows. Luckily for her, behind the scenery, she also had a very good brain. Which is why her birthday – today – is now commemorated as National Inventors Day in her native Austria, and Germany.

How many ships her face launched during its 1940s heyday is not recorded (it was the number of unsuccessful marriages it launched – six – that bothered her). But as if to balance the accounts, her brain’s greatest invention involved not so much launching ships as sinking them.

Lamarr’s first doomed marriage had been to a Viennese munitions manufacturer, observing whose work she developed ideas about making radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect. Based on “frequency hopping”, her system won a patent in 1942, after which – now living in the US – she offered it to the navy.

For better or worse, though, the navy passed on it at that time. And happily, Lamarr’s big idea would later become more associated with mobile telephony and WiFi. So it seems fair to conclude that, overall, her influence on shipping was positive.

MIND YOU,her most popular cinematic role was also somewhat destructive: she played the female lead in Cecil B De Mille's Samson and Delilah(1949). But in movie history, Lamarr had created a more famous landmark 16 years earlier in a European film called Ecstasy.

Although this included a nude bathing sequence, it was chiefly notorious for a scene in which the actress’s face conveyed what may have been mainstream cinema’s first female orgasm.

The extent to which she was entering into the role was long debated, and maybe still is in some circles.

Lamarr's version was more prosaic: or less prosaic – I'm not sure which. In any case, she claimed in her memoirs that her first attempt at conveying the required passion involved just closing her eyes. Whereupon – POSSIBLE MOVIE SPOILER ALERT – the director, yelled: " Nein, Nein!" And finding a safety pin somewhere, he opened it, lay down on the floor, out of the shot, and warned her that at the key moment in the next take, he would be jabbing her in the bottom.

Lamarr responded to this news with Teutonic stoicism: “I shrugged”. But her reaction to the director’s safety pin was convincing enough to get the film banned in the US, before securing a limited, art-house release.

Back in Europe, the movie was a commercial success in at least one sense. The actress’s husband – the same munitions manufacturer and Nazi supporter – is reputed to have spent $300,000 buying copies so he could destroy them. He also discouraged her from making more films and, by her account, kept her under house arrest until, disguising herself as a maid, she fled to Paris.

Beauty is famously fleeting, we know. But brains can't always be taken for granted either. When her acting career was at its height, Lamarr made some bad choices: turning down Casablancaamong them. And never mind "frequency-hopping" (which, incidentally, sounds like a description of her marital career), frequency shopping seems to have been a big factor in her life too.

In a 1967 autobiography, she admitted having earned and blown $30 million. She had then been recently arrested for shop-lifting. Even so, the big idea stood to her eventually, earning her some belated rewards in the telephony-obsessed 1990s.

Not all the payments were made voluntarily. In the final years, a US computer-graphics company paid a back-handed tribute to both her beauty and inventiveness by using her image in a promotional campaign. They may have forgotten she was still alive, however. At any rate, they didn’t ask permission first. She settled the subsequent lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.

IF THERE AREany inventors, Teutonic or otherwise, out there and looking for a challenge this November 9th, I think I may have identified one. It occurred to me last Friday when I cycled into town and – weighed down as usual by the worries of the world – unthinkingly locked my bike somewhere. The plan, after running some errands, was to continue cycling – out to Lansdowne Road for the rugby. But when the time came, could I remember where the bike was? I could not.

An attempted reconstruction of my movements narrowed down the parameters of the search site to – roughly speaking – the postal area known as Dublin 2. So I scoured the most likely locations, to no avail. Then there was nothing for it but to walk to Lansdowne, and walk back. At which point, numbed by freezing temperatures, two pints of beer, and a bad game, I resumed the search.

I looked up and down every street, lane, and alleyway between Dublin Castle and the Mansion House. No use. And I was all but convinced that the bike had disappeared – that perhaps in my absent-mindedness, I had locked it to the leg of a Grafton Street mime artist, who had since limped home – when at last I turned a corner and there it was.

At a time when cars can practically drive themselves, it seems to me that cycling technology lags way behind where it should be. Surely, as a minimum, bikes should have a chip embedded somewhere to reveal their whereabouts to an owner on a pre-arranged signal.

Well designed, it could be an anti-theft device, never mind an anti-forgetfulness one. And short-term, I’d settle for something that would beep in answer to the key-fob. In the longer term, however, I envisage a scenario in which a stolen bike will embarrass its thief by screaming for help from passers- by. Over to you, inventors.