Hedy Lamarr, movie star and inventor
Arguably one of the most beautiful movies stars in history, Hedy Lamarr acted alongside major movie stars like Charles Boyer, Clark Gable, Peter Lorre, James Stewart, Robert Taylor, and Spencer Tracy. But she was known for her brains as well with many inventions to her credit including one that is related to modern-day technology such as wifi.
She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (although reports say she added the 2 middle names herself) on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. Her father was a banker, and her mother was a sophisticated woman who gave up her ambition to be a concert pianist when Hedy was born. So she got a good education, and during the World War I years there, she gained a sense of public duty towards helping others less advantaged than she was.
After attending the movies, she would dress up in her parents' clothing and act out the scenes and dance as a young child. It was thought that her mother had actually wanted a boy, and Hedy believed that was why she gave her only mild comments about her looks, so that she wouldn't rely totally on them later in life. But it was her mother who introduced her to plays and movies (the first she saw was the science fiction film Metropolis). She won some beauty contests, acted in bit parts in small Viennese films, then moved to Berlin in 1931, where she studied acting seriously and met some big names along the way, like Otto Preminger.
In 1937 on a trip to London, she met producer Louis B. Mayer (founder of MGM studios), and his descriptions intrigued her with American films enough to travel there. On the boat across the Atlantic, Mayer felt her German name Kiesel would not be accepted in America, so he suggested that she become Lamarr, after the late actress Barbara La Marr, who coincidentally had previously been named by Mayer as the most beautiful woman in the world. This became legal in 1941.
You can read about her entire biography including her film career in the book Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film. I have linked a Google version that shows most of the story.
We can credit her banker father for initially instilling in her an interest in science. He showed her at a young age how machines like the printing press and streetcars in the world around her worked. Once, she even took apart a music box at home. When she became an actress in America, she found she had a lot of spare time between movies and even on the set, so she took up an interest in inventions and set up space in her home and in her movie trailer to experiment. She would look at failings in the world and set out to fix their flaws.
“I was different I guess. Maybe I came from a different planet. Who knows. But whatever it is, inventions are easy for me to do. I don’t have to work on ideas, they come naturally.”
From 1933 to 1937, she was married to military arms manufacturer Fritz Mendl, and this undoubtedly gave her some technical experience. It was at least exposure to the technology because Mendl and Hedy attended dinners with Nazis officials who discussed how to guide their torpedoes. When World War II broke out while she was in the U.S., she felt the need to help combat the Germans against her newly adopted country. Germany had submarines in the Atlantic Ocean wreaking havoc on naval ships. She enlisted in the help of an unlikely source, American music composer George Antheil, who was brilliant in many ways and who had had experience as a government munitions inspector. In the 1920s, he'd composed a 25-minute score for a silent film that was supposed to be performed by 16 synchronized player pianos! Unfortunately, he couldn't figure out how to sync the pianos. Such pianos of that day were mechanized to play automatically with spools of paper or metal sheets punched with holes for each of the 88 keys.
Hedy and George took that technology to task to fix a torpedo problem for the American Navy. Together, they designed a way for an airplane to remotely control the guidance system (navigation) of a torpedo as follows:
After the torpedo was launched, an airplane would monitor its movement and report course corrections back to the launch ship, which would readjust the torpedo’s path until it hit the target. The radio signal between plane and ship would transmit over constantly changing frequencies so it could not be intercepted or jammed by the enemy – an action she called “frequency hopping.” Ms. Lamarr and Mr. Antheil designed a separate frequency hopping system for use between the ship and torpedo. (from "Tinkering with Torpedoes How Hedy Lamarr’s WWII Invention Led to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth")
For LaMarr and Antheil, a player piano-like roll of paper would have 88 holes that switched the radio frequency from the ship to the torpedo in 88 settings, and thus the Germans could not easily jam the torpedo otherwise set on just one frequency. They patented this “Secret Communication System” in 1942 and offered it free to the Navy, but they thought the paper rolls had to be as large as on a player piano, which was incorrect, so they turned this down.
The Navy did use it in the 1950s, however, to design a surveillance sonar buoy to transmit the location of enemy submarines. At that time, they changed the terminology from frequency hopping to "spread spectrum". Today, this is used to reduce noise and interference from other signals in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, GPS, wireless networks, bar-code readers, and many military systems. That's how several Bluetooth devices can operate in the same room without jamming each other.
She even dated Howard Hughes, who supported her enthusiasm toward inventing by offering tools for her workshop. Other inventions from Hedy Lamarr included the following:
- an anti-aircraft shell that would explode when it sensed its proximity to the target
- an accordion-type attachment for a Kleenex box to help dispose of used tissues
- a new kind of traffic stoplight
- a device to help people get in and out of the bath
- a fluorescent dog collar
- a skin tautening technique based on the action of an accordion
- modifications to the Concorde supersonic passenger jet
- a tablet that would fizz in water and make a cola drink
- modified airplane wing design for Howard Hughes
- Inventors Club of America’s Chariot Award
- Austrian Association of Patent Holders’ Viktor Kaplan Medal
- Lockheed’s Milstar award
- Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award
- asteroid 32730 Lamarr
- Hedy Lamarr Quantum Communication Telescope, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Here is a 9-minute podcast about her.
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