A Charming Austrian Girl
She was Viennese, not yet seventeen in the spring of 1931 but already a professional actress, in rehearsal for a play. Hedwig Kiesler (pronounced HAYD-vig KEES-lur) -- Hedy -- had won a small role in the Berlin incarnation of The Weaker Sex, which the celebrated Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt was directing. When Reinhardt restaged the play in Vienna that spring, she had single-mindedly quit the Berlin cast and followed him home. "Are you here too, Fraulein Kiesler?" he'd asked her in surprise. "Are you living with your family? All right, you can be the Americaness again." ?douard Bourdet's play was a comedy with a pair of boorish stage Americans as foils. Reinhardt had assigned the actor George Weller, Hedy's husband in the play, to teach her some American songs. "I took this as a mandate to make an American out of Hedy Kiesler," the young Bostonian recalled.
She was eager to be transformed. "Hedy had only the vaguest ideas of what the United States were," Weller discovered, "except that they were grouped around Hollywood." She idolized the California tennis star Helen Wills, "Little Miss Poker Face." Wills, focused and unexpressive on the courts, all business, was the world's number-one-ranked female tennis player, midway that year through an unbroken run of 180 victories. "Watch me look like Helen Wills," Hedy teased Weller when they rehearsed together. "Du, schau' mal, hier bin ich Kleine Poker Face." Her lively young face would grow calm, Weller remembered, "expressionless and assured, her brow would clarify, and for a moment she would really become an American woman." Commandeering the property room, Hedy and George practiced singing "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," "Yes, We Have No Bananas," and an Austrian favorite, Al Jolson's lugubrious "Sonny Boy." It melted the matrons at matinees, many of them mothers with sons lost in the long slaughter of the Great War.
An only child, entertaining herself with her dolls, Hedy had dreamed since she was a little girl of becoming a movie star. "I had a little stage under my father's desk," she recalled, "where I would act out fairy tales. When someone would come into the room they would think my mind was really wandering. I was always talking to myself." Her tall, handsome, vigorous father, Emil, an athlete as well as a successful banker, told her stories, read her books, and took her on walks in their tree-lined neighborhood and in the great park of the Wienerwald -- the Vienna Woods. Wherever they went together, he explained to her how everything worked -- "from printing presses to streetcars," she said. Her father's enthusiasm for technology links her lifelong interest in invention with cherished memories of her favorite parent.
Hedy's mother was stricter, concerned that such a pretty, vivacious child would grow up spoiled unless she heard criticism as well as compliments. "She has always had everything," Trude Kiesler said. "She never had to long for anything. First there was her father who, of course, adored her, and was very proud of her. He gave her all the comforts, pretty clothes, a fine home, parties, schools, sports. He looked always for the sports for her, and music." Trude had trained as a concert pianist before motherhood intervened. In turn, she supervised Hedy's lessons on the grand piano in the Kiesler salon. "I underemphasized praise and flattery," Trude determined, "hoping in this way to balance the scales for her."
The Kieslers were assimilated Jews, Trude from Budapest, Emil from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Hedy kept her Jewish heritage secret throughout her life; her son and daughter only learned of it after her death. In prewar Vienna it had hardly mattered. The Viennese population's mixed legacy of Slavic, Germanic, Hungarian, Italian, and Jewish traditions was one of its glories, one reason for the city's unique creative ferment in the first decades of the new century. Sigmund Freud's daughters attended the same girls' middle school that Hedy later did, and after the war Anna Freud taught there.
Leaving Fritz
Hedy never specified in detail which German technological advances she heard discussed over luncheons and dinners in the Mandl mansions, but there was much to hear. In 1935, the monocoque-bodied Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter and the dual-use Heinkel He 111 bomber both saw their first flight tests. The small, heavily armed cruisers that the British called pocket battleships began entering service in the German navy. In 1936, the first of the new Type VII diesel-electric attack submarines was commissioned, and Adolf Hitler began planning his Westwall of defensive fortifications opposite France's Maginot Line.
Certainly Hedy listened closely to discussions of submarine and aerial torpedoes, weapon systems for which Hirtenberger was supplying components. The genius of German torpedo development at that time was a northern German mechanical engineer named Hellmuth Walter. Born with the century and educated at the Hamburg Technical Institute, Walter was particularly interested in submarine propulsion, which was limited by the problem of supplying oxygen underwater to sustain combustion.
The standard submarine of the day (and throughout World War II) used diesel engines for surface operation, where it could draw in air from outside the vessel. Underwater, with no available air supply, it had to switch to battery-powered electric motors, which limited its speed and the time it could remain submerged before its batteries had to be recharged. On the surface such a submarine might make 17 knots ("knots" is a phonetic abbreviation of "nautical miles per hour"; 1 knot equals 1.15 miles per hour). Underwater it could make half that speed at best, while the ships it might be stalking could pull away (or hunt it down) at surface speeds of up to 35 knots. Walter wanted to find a means, he wrote, "to drive a submarine at much higher speeds than the conventional 6 or 8 knots, submerged."
In the 1920s, while employed as a marine engineer at Stettiner Maschinenbau AG Vulcan in Stettin, on the Baltic, Walter worked out his ideas: Instead of carrying fuel for engines that needed air to sustain combustion, preventing their operation underwater, why not identify an oxygen-rich fuel that could be chemically decomposed to supply its own oxygen, and use that reaction to drive a turbine directly? There were such fuels. Pure oxygen was obviously one, but storage in a small space such as a submarine would require that it be cooled to a liquid and maintained there, below its boiling point of ?297.33&deg;F. Nitric acid was another, with 63.5 percent oxygen available when decomposed, but it was highly corrosive and difficult to store and handle.
A little research led Walter to hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, a liquid slightly denser than water first isolated by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thenard in 1818. Used in low concentrations, up to 30 percent, as a bleaching agent and a disinfectant, hydrogen peroxide at high concentrations could be decomposed by contact with an appropriate catalyst into steam and oxygen -- H2O + O -- in the process generating intense heat: 80 percent H2O2 when it decomposed would generate a temperature of 869&deg;F, superheating the steam sufficiently to drive a power plant without adding any additional fuel. Fuel could be added, however, drawing on the oxygen released from the H2O2 for combustion and further superheating the steam, increasing its propulsive energy. In the first case, the purity of the H2O2 would determine the rate of energy release; in the second, the injection of a fuel such as alcohol or kerosene into a combustion chamber to mix with the decomposing H2O2 could be throttled to vary the output on demand. In either case, the energy would be generated without the need for additional air.
Walter found very little available research on the use of hydrogen peroxide for energy production, he recalled, "only isolated suggestions which have never been developed beyond the stage of theoretical discussion." Nor was there much interest at Vulcan in H2O2 research. Frustrated, Walter took his ideas to the German naval command in Berlin. "Years later," a biographer writes, "colleagues remembered him carrying around papers for his Unterwasser Schnellboot [underwater fast boat], so that he could lobby for his proposals at any opportunity."
The naval command was interested, but before Walter could proceed with research and development, he had to prove to its officials that H2O2 was safe for transportation and storage. Higher concentrations were commonly believed to be dangerously explosive, a prejudice that had seriously retarded research. Tests at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin -- exploding lead azide, a strong detonator, with H2O2, decomposing it under pressure -- established its non-detonability up to 80 percent strength. "After the encouraging results of this period of predevelopment and research," Walter writes, "I founded my own engineering firm on July 1, 1935. The real development of engines and rockets started after this date."
Commercialization was further encouraged by President Jimmy Carter's inflation czar, Alfred E. Kahn, a Cornell economist best known for deregulating the U.S. airline industry while chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978. Kahn, a liberal Democrat, promoted government deregulation for economic reasons, believing that it spurred economic development -- a cause later taken up with conservative ideological fervor by President Ronald Reagan. At the Federal Communications Commission between 1977 and 1981, chairman Charles D. Ferris, a Boston-born physicist and attorney, abandoned the usual FCC practice of finding a consensus with the electronics industry before changing or adding to FCC rules. Instead, in line with Carter and Kahn's emphasis on deregulation for economic growth, Ferris looked for innovative technologies hampered by what his assistant Michael J. Marcus calls "anachronistic technical regulations." There was a reason for the regulations, Marcus explains:
 In the 1970s the spectrum technology area was highly concentrated, with only a few major manufacturers:
Western Electric was the near-exclusive supplier of the local and long distance telecommunications industry, cellular was in its experimental stage, and the regulatory status quo was rather acceptable to the small "club" of major manufacturers serving the US market, all of whom were domestic companies. While regulations prevented rapid innovation, it [sic] also generally prevented both new entrants and technological surprise from the few competitors. Products could be planned and introduced with assurances that the R&D costs could be amortized over a long sales period. It was a cozy oligarchy for the major manufacturers, but it denied the public the benefits of rapid introduction of new technologies and services just as in the parallel Bell System telecommunications monopoly.
Ferris set out to change the situation, beginning with a study the FCC commissioned, delivered in December 1980, titled Potential Use of Spread Spectrum Techniques in Non-government Applications. Its key finding: "Spread spectrum techniques offer a unique method of sharing a common band between multiple users without requiring the users to coordinate their transmissions in any way." For technical as well as political reasons, the report raised the possibility of using what are called the ISM bands -- the radio frequencies allocated to industrial, scientific, and medical uses other than communication (such as microwave ovens and equipment for medical diathermy and industrial heating) -- for spread-spectrum radio. Such equipment generated radio noise that interfered with narrow-band radio transmissions, which was why it had been allocated frequency bands of its own. (They were also called the garbage bands.) Spread spectrum, however, was resistant to such interference just as it was resistant to jamming. And since radio spectrum is limited, any new technology that could be overlaid onto spectrum already assigned to other transmissions without interfering with those transmissions was of obvious benefit. Or so Ferris and Marcus hoped.
The benefits were less obvious to competing interests within both government and industry. Marcus felt as if he were advancing into a lion's den in 1983 when he went to the National Security Agency to make his case.
Celebrity culture spreads like a stain. It engulfs even those whose fame is rooted in real achievement or real responsibility. As the empty are valued, so the valuable are emptied. They are treated as if they were as vacuous as pop idols.