Hopping with Hedy Lamarr

I cover Hetty Lamar. So from the nineteen thirties until ninety head vig Ava Keisler, better known in the United States as Hetty Lamar, appeared in feature films like Boomtown, Lady of the Tropics, and Tortilla Flat. She played Delilah in Samson and Delilah and the Cecil B. De Mill epic film. He acted opposite people like Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland and Zigfried Girl or Zigfeld Girl, I should say not Zigfried. She was in several films and TV shows,

but more importantly to text Stuff. She made important contributions to technology that for decades was completely unknown by the general public and only relatively recently has been part of the general discussion essentially since about n or So. In this episode, I'm going to talk a lot about hay

Lamar's life, not just her work in technology. And I'm doing this because I think it's really important to get an understanding of what her world was like and what it must have been like to come up with a fiendishly clever and useful idea that would go unacknowledged for decades. Her story is in many ways tragic, but to understand that tragedy, we really need to learn about her life in general. So Hetty Lamar was born on November nine in Vienna, Austria, to a well to do Jewish family.

Her father was a banker and a technology enthusiast, and as a child, Lamar was known to be really curious and inquisitive and drawn to the sciences, particularly chemistry. She enjoyed studying, and she enjoyed experimenting with stuff. At the age of five, she took apart a music box to see how it worked, and then meticulously reassembled it so that it would work again. Reportedly, she spent a lot of time talking with her father, emil Keisler, in an

effort to learn how stuff works. Sounds like she would have really liked the website I wrote for. She wanted to know stuff about electricity, how street cars worked, how power plants work, and when she grew into a teenager,

she also noticed that people started treating her differently. She was a beautiful young woman, and she could not help but notice that she had a real effect on other people when she was in their presence, particular really among men, and she found she kind of liked having this sort of power and effect on people. At the age of sixteen, she started modeling for photographers, including doing some nude modeling, and in an interview, Lamar referred to herself as a

L'Enfant terrible child. In other words, as a French expression, and it typically means a child who speaks without any kind of filter, someone who might just speak what they're thinking immediately without considering it's a fact, and thus potentially embarrassing an adult nearby. For example, it happened to me personally when I was in a grocery store and a mom and her little son are walking past me, and the little son looks at me and looks at his mom and says, Mommy, that man has no hair. Well,

that's true. I'm bald, but I know that I'm familiar with it. It's not a shock to my system. I've been living that way for two decades. But the mother was horrified that her child would say something like that in public, an earshot of me. I thought it was funny because it was just an observation and it didn't bother me at all. But that's sort of the kind

of thing they mean. But the expression can also refer to someone in the creative arts, like an actor or a dancer, or an artist or a photographer, someone who thinks outside the norm, who is more avant garde and more daring and potentially more offensive as a result, someone who goes against the standard and therefore can end up stirring up trouble. She referred to herself in this context. In n three, when she was just nineteen years old, she was cast in a Czech Austrian film called Ecstasy.

This movie became infamous at the time for one thing. Henny Lamar appears nude in the film and a couple of different scenes, and there was also a sex singing in that movie that was considered positively scandalous by the standards of the day, Lamar would earn for herself a reputation that would follow her throughout her life, largely because of that movie. Unfairly, i would say, especially when you

compare it to films today. It was nothing particularly uh racy by a lot of today's R rated movie standards, but at the time it was considered absolutely scandalous. She also had to reconcile with her father, whom she loved dearly. In fact, she would later say in her life that no man she ever was attached to could measure up

to her father. He was extremely upset by the film and the scandal, and then, sort of as a way to kind of redeem herself in a sense, she went on to perform in a prestigious stage production, a very respectful stage production, and that kind of helped heal her reputation, at least for the time being. She also met and then married a wealthy arms manufacturer named Fritz Mandel, who was fourteen years older than she was, so she was nineteen,

he was thirty three. According to interviews, several historians have suggested that Lamar liked the thought of being an influential man's wife. She found that idea appealing, but she soon found Mandel to be controlling and domineering. He was also supplying weapons to Germany, which meant he was weaponizing the Nazi Party. This was early in the history of the Nazi Party in Germany. Hitler would not become fewer until

August second, nineteen thirty four. Mandel, though Jewish, was seen as incredibly important for Germany's plans, and while Hitler probably never visited Mandel's estate personally because he would not want to be captured on film as associating with someone who was Jewish, it is true that Mussolini was a house guest of Mandel's. Fritz was reportedly a very jealous man, constantly suspecting Hetty lamar Uh, suspecting his wife of infidelity, and he tried to buy up all the prints of

the film Ecstasy in order to suppress the movie. He didn't want other people seeing his wife nude on film, but really that just gave the filmmakers more incentive to make more prints of the negative because he kept on buying them, so there was already made audience, even if it was just a one person. He spent more than a couple hundred thousand dollars buying up prints of this movie, and they just kept printing up more, and so finally

he kind of gave up on that. The two remained married for four years, but by nineteen thirty seven, tensions were running high in Europe and in her household. Hitler had already begun his anti Semitic policies by the time, though Mandel was again sort of insulated and protected by his occupation as an armament's manufacturer. But Hetty's father, Emil, was distraught by what was going on in the world,

and the stress was really getting to him. He actually would die of a heart attack that year, and that devastated Hetty. Hetty had decided that by this time she had to get away. She was scared, she was angry, she was disgusted by what was happening in Europe and Hitler's campaign against Jewish people, and so one evening she

decided to escape from Mandel's home and flee. And there are different accounts of how she managed this, including some in which she supposedly drugged a maid, used some sleeping powder mixed in a drink and gave it to the maid, which made her fall unconscious, and then she ended up switching places with the maid, dressing in the maid's outfit, and then making her escape that night. Whatever that she used,

she did flee to England. In England, she had the good fortune to run into Louis B. Meyer, the co founder of MGM Studios. Meyer was touring England looking for European talent who were fleeing the continent. So he was kind of taking advantage of a really bad situation and saying, hey, if things are too hot here, you should come to America. Sign with me, become an actor in my studio, and I'll give you a living. So he offered Lamar the princely sum of one five dollars per week if she

would sign on to a studio. Now, a quick word about this. From the nineteen twenties until about the nineteen sixties, movie studios had sort of a death grip on film stars and directors and movie theaters. Talent would sign contracts with a specific movie studio and that would guarantee a certain number of films or pictures for that studio, and they would be locked in. They could not make movies for competing studios unless there was an agreement between the

two studios, and some sort of exchange. So the studios also would own chains of theaters, and they would have their own films shown in those theaters and not their competitors films. There were some independent theater owners in the United States at that time, but the movie studios would also end up leveraging their power over those independent outlets as well. What they would do is something called a

a block booking deal. Block Booking was where let's say you're an independent film theater operator and you really want to UH exhibit Gone with the Wind, and you really need to have a print of Gone with the Wind

because you want to show it in your theater. Block Booking would mean that if you wanted to show that movie, the movie studio would say, all right, well, you can buy Gone with the windprint for X amount of dollars, but you also have to show these other four movies that were bundling with that film, and you would be forced to take on all those movies and try to

show all of those movies at your theater. That practice is ultimately what brought down the whole studio system, because there was an antitrust lawsuit in the UH well started in the thirties, but really it didn't completely develop until the fifties, and at that point the movie studio system started to break apart, and eventually the studios had to stop this practice, and so you no longer have this system where a movie studio will sign an actor to

a certain number of pictures. You have franchises that will do that, like Star Wars or the Marvel films, where they'll sign an actor and it will guarantee a certain number of films within that franchise. But they are no longer a studio exclusive. They can still do films with other film studios. But back in Hetty's day, that wasn't the case, and a hud dollars a week did not seem like it was going to be enough for her. Because here's a woman who came from a privileged background.

She grew up in a wealthy household in Austria. She then married a wealthy man, the armament's manufacturer. She still had a great deal of money and jewels and really nice clothing on her. She didn't just flee with the clothes on her back. She really had pretty pretty swanky luggage on her at the same time. So she knew that dollars wasn't gonna be That wasn't gonna cut it, and so she told Meyer, no thanks, I'm not going

to take that deal. However, she did want to go to America and she did want to work in movies. So what she did was she found out what boat Meyer was taking back from England to return to the United States and booked herself on the same ship. Then she made it a point to walk by him as frequently as she hood in different outfits, including one where she was just dressed to the nines, decked out in the most amazing gown, and Meyer said, I have to

have this actress in my studio. So he went back to her and gave her a new offer of five dollars per week, which she accepted. In America, she took on the stage name of Hetty Lamar, which they figured was a better name. At the time, there was a lot of fear on Myers part of having actors and actresses who had Jewish last names, and this is just an unfortunate side effect of the time, so she ended up adopting the name Hetty Lamar as her stage name.

She dated several prominent men, including Howard Hughes, the businessman, pilot film director and later on kind of eccentric. I guess is the word you use when you're that wealthy, but he was famously odd. Hughes and Lamar struck up a friendship. Lamar had built an inventing table in her

own home. She still enjoyed experimenting and tinkering with stuff, and when Howard Hughes found out, he ended up giving her a gift of a smaller inventing table, one that was semi portable that she could set up in something like a movie trailer, so when she was on a movie shoot she could have a little inventing table in her dressing room trailer and have a place to kind of unwind and tinker with things. There's actually a story about Hughes and Lamar that I want to mention before

I go to break. Hughes was working hard on building airplanes. He was a pilot, but he also had a design desire to create a plane that was really fast and maneuverable, largely because he anticipated that the United States military was going to have a need of them with the possibility of war in Europe looming. But his designs were not producing the results he wanted, so Lamar took a look at these planes which had wings that ended in sort

of a squared off shape. They kind of look like like flat rectangles extending out from the sides of the plane, and then a it struck her as wrong. So she went out and bought books on fish and birds and started studying their fins and their wings respectively, and started looking for the fastest animals in those categories, and then looking at their wings and saying how are their fins and saying how are they shaped? How does that help

this animal move through the air through the water. And then she sketched out a wing for an airplane based on those shapes and told Hughes he would have better luck with a similar design, and he said that she was a genius. Now, in the next section, I'm going to talk more about the technology that Lamar helped invent and why it was so important, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor Hetty. Lamar would then go on to marry a screenwriter named Gene Markis

in nineteen thirty nine. He would be the second of six husbands. Lamar had a tendency to attract men to her, but it seems most of those men didn't really know her as a person. They saw her beauty. That's what they fixated upon. So I'm not going to go through each and every marriage because that would be excessive and far beyond what we need to talk about in this show.

But I think it's good to know she had trouble finding someone she fit with because it gives a sense of the frustration and isolation she must have felt throughout her life. We we had seen at this point that war was inevitable. War had actually started to break out in Europe, and by nine that war was well under way, and Lamar was ordered by Meyer to never mention her religion. Remember, Hetty Lamar grew up Jewish. Lamar seemed fine, at least

with leaving behind her Jewish identity. At least she didn't seem to put up any kind of fuss about this and never had a problem sort of moving beyond that. But she did very much want to find a way to have her mother or join her in the United States.

Her mom had successfully fled Austria to arrive in England, but she was kind of stuck there for the time being, And meanwhile, German submarines were terrorizing the seas around Britain, with several high profile attacks, including one resulting in a passenger ship being targeted and destroyed, with all the passengers aboard passing away, including children. So Lamar began to think about ways that she might be able to help Britain. Because at this time the United States was not in

World War Two. One of the big problems that the Allies were facing at that point was that the submarines were able to avoid torpedoes effectively enough to pose as a massive threat. So Hetty Lamar had this idea for a radio controlled torpedo. The big challenge with radio communications is that they aren't secure on their own. If I am communicating with you on a radio, freak and see anyone with a receiver can tune into that frequency and

listen into that conversation. So unless I speak in some sort of code, everything I say will be clearly heard and understood on your end. Further, if someone else wants to ruin my attempts to communicate with you, they could start transmitting noise on that same frequency, uh, the one that I am using to try and communicate with you. And if they just use more transmitter power than I am using, whichever signal is the strongest will win out, so their signal will overpower mine, and that's what we

call jamming. Jamming just involves flooding the frequency band with a stronger transmission signal. Now, that was the challenge that

engineers were facing with radio controlled torpedoes. If they settled on a control frequency and they sent the torpedo on its way, and then they started to send commands like rut or left or rut or right in order to turn the torpedo, the Germans could potentially pick up on at radio frequency and then start broadcasting on that same frequency, and they could broadcast nonsense, jamming the signal and preventing

the Allies from being able to control this torpedo. Lamar's idea was to use a system that would allow you to change frequencies as you transmit information. So you might start your commands using a frequency like three killer hurts, then jump up the three hurts, then back down to three hurts, and so on and so forth as you're transmitting.

And because you are varying the frequency rapidly, your enemies are not likely to discover which frequency you're using at any given time, and they can't predict which frequency you're going to use next. So if you keep each section of transmission really short, you're able to send commands to your torpedo without fear of the enemy jamming your signal because they don't know which signal to use, which frequency

to use. But there's a big trick to this. You have to devise some way to have your receiver changed to tune into the podcast frequency at the same time. So, in other words, the transmitter and the receiver both need to be working on that same channel, and then you have to switch channels in a way that appears to be random, but it has to be perfectly synchronized. Otherwise your broadcast is going to start speaking in languages that

your receiver can't understand. So they both have to change to the same frequencies at the same time, and that was a real challenge. How do you do that well? Lamar may have gotten a little inspiration from a relatively new technology back in the late nineteen thirties, the remote control, specifically the phil Co Mystery Remote Radio Control, which debuted in nineteen thirty nine. It was the first wireless remote

for a radio. Previous manufacturers had played with wired remotes so they would still be connected to a radio by a cable, and that would let you change stations without you know, having to walk all the way across the room to the actual radio set. The Philco Mystery radio control looks a little bit like a wooden box with an old fashioned rotary telephone dial set into it, but it didn't have a hand set, so it's not like a telephone with a with a handset that you would

hold and then you dial on this rotary dial. Instead, it was just the box and the dial on it, and depending on what you had, you might have labels on that dial that correspond with the radio stations that are in your area, So there would be the call signs for each of those radio stations, and you would put your finger in the hole for the radio station that you want and dial it, and that would tune the radio across the room to whatever the station was

of your choice. Lamar saw that and thought, well, if we could come up with a means to allow a uh A radio set to tune in this way, maybe we could use that same sort of technology for a torpedo. We would be in business if we could do this. But while she had a great idea. She didn't have any mechanical engineering or ttrical engineering training, so she ran

up against the extent of her knowledge. However, she did talk about her idea with a friend of hers named George An Tile, who would add another piece to this concept. And Tile was born in nineteen hundred in Trenton, New Jersey. He also was not an electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer. He finished school or dropped out, depending upon how you read it when he was fifteen years old. He was

a musician and a composer. He became interested in avant garde performances and eventually composed a piece called Le Ballet mechanique, which was a piece scored for player pianos and other devices as well as actual musicians. He wrote the piece in nineteen twenty four, and it's a fairly jarring piece of music. You can actually find recordings of it online

and listen to it, and it's not easy listening. But and Tile synchronized the player pianos so that they would play in time properly with each other and with the rest of the musicians. And it was this idea that would be valuable to Lamar's concept. And now I get to talk about how player pianos work, which I did not anticipate when I chose this topic. So you may have seen a player piano in person or on television or in films, particularly in movies set in the Old West.

They tend to be on those These are the pianos that always have those rolls of paper in them. Uh. There there stand upright pianos, and you can see these rolls of paper. The paper has little holes cut out in patterns on it, and obviously those holes correspond with notes. But how does it actually work in a classic player piano or pianola. That's what they're also known as. Everything is dependent upon new matics, which is a system that

uses air to move things mechanically. Typically, a player piano has foot pedals, and if you pump the foot pedals, you power bellows that are inside the player piano. But you're not pumping air into the system. You're actually create eating a vacuum. You're sucking air out of the system. And if you were to take the roll of paper off of the piano, you would see underneath it there's kind of a horizontal bar that's mounted at about I height. Typically on player pianos and has a bunch of holes

cut into the bar. It might be a brass bar or something like that, and there will be little holes cut in through this. Those holes will correspond with notes. Each hole connects to a tube and the tube runs to a specific note. More on that in a second. So the paper acts as a seal over those holes. So when the paper turns and the holes in the paper line up with the holes in the bar mounted on the piano, air can pass through from outside through

the hole into the player piano. Because remember there's a vacuum inside the system, so it's constantly sucking against that paper, So whenever there's a hole in the paper, air can come through. The air travels through the tube to the individual note and inflates a tiny bellows. Each note has its own set of bellows, and that in turn sets forth a motion that is translated by several levered elements that ultimately ends with a hammer striking the respective string

and producing the note. So each time a hole in the paper passes over this bar, this happens. And some musicians like Antile began to compose music for player pianos, in particular because they could also play more notes at one time than a single human musician ever. Could you have eighty eight keys on a piano, You could do eighty eight holes next to each other, and you could have all eighty eight keys play at the same time, so you could play more notes than a human being

could ever manage his or her own self. So some people began to use that as a means of composing music for a piano that a human could never play, at least not by themselves. So if you want to hear one of my favorite versions of this, you can search for Gershwin plays Gershwin and listen for Rhapsody in Blue, which is one of the Gershwin's most famous pieces. The recording was made by taking a role of piano paper that was designed by Gershwin himself of his famous composition,

and then they digitized the information. They took all the information from the player piano role and they converted that into digital information. They added in some dynamics because that was not in the player piano role. In other words, there was no way of telling the difference between a hard note and a soft note, but they added the information in. So there's a little bit of extra info that was added into this stuff, and then they ended up playing it back on the equivalent of a high

tech player piano, and it's pretty phenomenal stuff. An Tile had synchronized player pianos simply by making sure the pianos were set up to the right speed, as you could use different levers to engage gears for a faster or slower rotation of the role of piano paper. That would be dependent upon the needs of the piece. So, for example, if you had something that needed to be played at a slight slower tempo, you could adjust the player piano

to roll back the paper at a slower speed. If you need something faster, you could change that up too. And then he had to make sure that he was starting all the pianos all at the same time. So why not take this system one that worked for player pianos and poured it over to a torpedo control system. Instead of notes, the holes in the paper would correspond

with radio frequencies, specific frequencies in a whole band. The technology already existed to create the roles of paper because they were used in in player pianos and lamar and and Tile's proposal was to use those A eight radio frequencies, just like a piano has. A standard piano has eight eight keys, fifty two white keys, and thirty six black keys.

Unlike a typical player piano song, you'd really only need to engage one frequency at a time, So it's not like you would pull an actual song, uh that already existed in player piano form. You're not gonna take Mary had a little lamb off the shelf and plug one copy into a torpedo and another into a guidance system and then use that to steer your torpedo to a target.

But the basic idea was the same. Lamar and Antile sent their idea to the National Inventors Council in Washington, d C. This organization grew out of the Department of Commerce's Office of Technical Services. It was sort of a predecessor for DARPA in some ways, as the inventions were meant to aid the efforts of national defense and the military in general. The Council liked what they saw in the proposal, and they put Antile and Lamar in touch

with an electronics expert at cal Tech. Now we're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk more about what came of this collaboration and how this incredible idea was treated in the world of the military. But first, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Heavy Lamar, under the name Heady Keisler. Marquis filed for a patent for her system as co inventor with George

Antile on June tenth one. The Patent Office would grant the patent on August eleven, two and the title of the patent is secret Communication System. You can read it if you like, you just go to a patent search. The number is two million, two seven. The patent is actually pretty easy to read compared to a lot of other patents, particularly more recent ones. I've gone through a lot of patents as a podcaster of tech stuff, but

this one is pretty straightforward and incredibly clever. Here's how their system would have worked both your transmitter and your receiver uh, which in this patent was a torpedo. Specifically, they referred to it as a torpedo, but they also explain within the patent itself that the system could be adapted to other things. Would have identical rolls of paper with holes in the paper representing specific frequencies up to eighty eight in number. The paper rolls did not contain

any actual commands themselves. That wouldn't make any sense. They just made sure there was a channel of communication that was open, so those holes would make sure the transmitter and receiver were connected. Commands would actually be sent by an operator. It wouldn't make any sense to pre program commands in because it would all be situational. Right you're you're trying to steer a torpedo. You can't predict in advance which way you're going to need to steer the torpedoes.

So this was all about just creating that open channel of communication that could not easily be jammed by the enemy. The patent points out that the system could work not only aboard a ship with a torpedo, but also a plane and a torpedo. So you could have a plane with a synchronized system issuing commands to the torpedo over in the air. So you could have a plane monitoring the pathway of the torpedo and taking over and commanding it to turn laughter, turn right, or however it needs

to go. To synchronize the two systems, the patent suggested a method that would include solenoids held into place by electric current. So a solenoid is a type of electro magnet. It's typically a coil wound in a helix and it connect as a transducer that turns energy into linear motion. So think of a piston and it has an electro

magnet inside the piston. So when you have current running through the electro magnet, the coil moves to one end of the piston and sort of locks into place because that's where the magnetic force is pushing or pulling the coil. If the electrical current is broken, the electro magnet turns

off and the solenoid is unlocked. It moves into the opposite direction, and the patent the invention describes such a solenoid that holds a pin in place, and when the pin is pulled out of the device, a clockwork motor turns the paper roll. So a battery would provide current two pens in both the transmitting and the receiving stations, so both aboard the ship or the plane and aboard

the torpedo. Upon firing the torpedo, this electrical connection breaks and the pens release, which start the electric motors in both stations and spends the paper rolls in their respective UH spaces, whether it's on the plane or on the ship or in the torpedo, at the same rate of speed, and that synchronizes them. Not all of those eight frequencies wouldn't be necessary for the receiver. In fact, the patent suggests that the transmitter include frequencies that the receiver cannot

physically detect. Now it's not so you send extra information. It's actually, well, I guess in the way it is to send extra information, but specifically to confuse the enemy. So if the Germans were to pin up these signals, they wouldn't know which signals represented a real open channel between the ship and the torpedo, for example, or which ones were dummy frequencies that we're coming from the ship

but could not be picked up by the torpedo. By transmitting across both, you would reduce the chance the enemy would catch onto which signals are important, Which is similar to the way baseball players will use various signals to communicate with each other, such as when a pitching coach sends a message to a baseball pitcher. You'll see this whole series of hand motions that get increasingly weird and bizarre.

Some of those signals are just filler. They're meant to confound the imposing teams, so they don't know which of the signals are actually meaningful. In order to indicate which signals are real and which ones aren't, the invention also included a lamp for the transmitter station that would indicate if there was a real channel of communication open or not, and operators were meant to keep an eye on the lamp so they would know whether the com munications with

the receiver were really active. They could send commands during times when the communication wasn't active in order to confound the enemy, but they would have to keep in mind those were not quote unquote real commands. They were going out to a deaf audience. It was only when the communication channel was complete on both sides that they could actually send a command to the torpedo that would be acted upon. As for the physical operations, they were remarkably

similar to a player piano. They would use electric pumps to suck the air from the system, creating the same sort of vacuum as you would find in player pianos, although those tended to be foot pedal and bellows type systems. When the holes in the paper would pass over their respective holes in the bar in the system, air would pass through. On the other end of the transmitter side

are a series of pistons with springs inside them. The springs are coiled with stored potential energy, but the vacuum in the system prevents the springs from extending, so the pistons would be retracted against the springs because the vacuum is sucking all of the pistons to their their compressed state. When air would be allowed to pass through one of those pistons, the vacuum would be broken, the spring would extend, and that would cause the piston to move up and

close a switch which would activate that specific frequency. And then once the hole would pass over, like once the hole in the paper would pass away and it would be sealed again, the vacuum would re establish and the piston would retract, and so it would change to a different frequency, whichever frequency was active for that specific moment. The design was an elegant solution to a very real problem, and Lamar and Until submitted their idea to the United

States Navy. In our next episode, we'll talk about what happened next and how that concept, which Lamar dubbed frequency hopping, would become a principle in multiple technologies today. There were other people who had suggested concepts either similar to frequency hopping or pretty much the same idea, But hey, Lamar's presentation showed a practical approach as to how to accomplish this, And it takes a special kind of thinking to go

from hypothetical concept to a practical idea. So I don't mean to suggest that Hetty Lamar's notion of frequency hopping was the one and only time anyone ever came up with us. There were earlier ones. They were not widely publicized, but they did exist if you knew where to look for them. But it was still appears to me that Lamar pretty much came up with this idea on her own. She was not aware of these other uh hypothesized versions of frequency hopping, and no one had called it that yet.

Before I signed off in this episode, I wanted to mention one of the sources that I referenced heavily while I was putting together my research, and that is a documentary about Hetty Lamar's life called Bombshell, and it focuses not just on her work in developing equency hopping, but also her work as an actress, her life in Hollywood, her trials and tribulations, her various marriages, her family life,

her struggle with drug addiction. It's a fascinating story. So if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend checking out the documentary. Again, it's called Bombshell. Well, that wraps up this particular episode. In our next one, we will continue the story and we'll also look at some other interesting inventions that celebrities have have put forward over the years. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,

send me a message. You can email me at tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop me a message on Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again about Hey Lamar really soon for more on this and bathands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com. W