template

Brief Info

Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000), was an Austrian-American actress, inventor, and film producer. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years, and co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum.
Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. That’s the way I was. The unknown was always so attractive to me… and still is.
Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and acted in a number of Austrian, German, and Czech films in her brief early film career, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933). In 1937, she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, secretly moving to Paris and then onward to London. There she met Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where he began promoting her as "the world's most beautiful woman".

Personality

Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it.
Hedy has the most incredible personal sophistication. She knows the peculiarly European art of being womanly; she knows what men want in a beautiful woman, what attracts them, and she forces herself to be these things. She has magnetism with warmth, something that neither Dietrich nor Garbo has managed to achieve. – Writer Howard Sharpe impression about Hedy Lamarr.

Inventor

Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer. Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her inventive "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.

Frequency-hopping spread spectrum

Copy of U.S. patent for "Secret Communication System" During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She conceived an idea and contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her implement it. Together they developed a device for doing that, when he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled: We began talking about the war, which, in the late summer of 1940, was looking most extremely black. Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about munitions and various secret weapons ... and that she was thinking seriously of quitting MGM and going to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established National Inventors Council. Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at the time the US Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. Nevertheless, it was classified in the "red hot" category. It was first adapted in 1957 to develop a sonobuoy before the expiration of the patent, although this was denied by the Navy. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, an updated version of their design was installed on Navy ships. Today, various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi. Lamarr and Antheil's contributions were formally recognized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.