Known for her roles in classic cinema, Hedy Lamarr was much more: inventor, engineer, and 'mother' of technologies that make our lives much easier today.
Hedy Lamarr was considered for many years the most beautiful woman in the world, an actress who dazzled the public in the great productions of the so-called "golden era" of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In the 1930s and 1940s, she shared the bill with actors such as Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and Spencer Tracy, and her face was the inspiration for Snow White and Catwoman.
But what few knew at the time was that Lamarr also had a prodigious mind for inventions and some of her discoveries have ended up being key pieces of technologies that we use daily today such as Bluetooth, WiFi or GPS.
Lamarr, born in Austria, was a self-taught inventor. She never had a formal education as an engineer and from a very young age she decided that her main career would be film. She attended classes at director Max Reinhardt's Berlin Academy and began acting at the age of 16 under her real name, Hedy Kiesler.
At 18 she had her first important role as the protagonist of the Czech film Ecstasy, a highly erotic film in which the actress appeared completely N-. Marrying Austrian arms manufacturer Fritz Mandl, who was three decades her senior and supplied weapons and ammunition to fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, caused her temporary absence from the screen after her initial marriage.
Disenchanted by the excess of control that she exercised over her in her life - it was he who forced her to stop acting - and her friendships with Hitler and Mussolini, Kiesler decided to leave Mandl. She disguised herself as one of the domestic helpers to escape from her house and she went to London to meet American producer Louis B. Mayer in person, whom she convinced to give her a contract with MGM. In the US, she changed her last name to Lamarr in honor of silent film actress Barbara La Marr.
Her first US film, Algiers was a huge success and made Lamarr one of Hollywood's best-known and most in-demand stars. In the following years, she participated in various blockbusters such as Boom Town.
The outbreak of World War II, however, revived her interest in engineering. Lamarr had an innate talent for mathematics and physics and tremendous creativity in solving complex problems. It was she, for example, who gave Howard Hughes a great friend and lover- the idea of evolving the design of airplane wings, adding curves and a more aerodynamic shape inspired by the bodies of fish and birds.
Lamarr worked on ideas as diverse as new traffic signals or pills to turn water into soft drinks, but his most important invention was a frequency-hopping radio transmission system, designed to prevent the control signal from torpedoes from being interfered with.
It came to him during a chat with his Hollywood neighbor, the composer George Antheil, in the summer of 1940. The idea of communication via a constantly changing frequency synchronized between sender and receiver had crossed the minds of some inventors and scientists in the past.
Combining Antheil's expertise in using synchronized pianos for his compositions and Lamarr's mathematical genius, the two created a mechanism similar to piano rolls that synchronized transmitter and receiver changes between 88 frequencies. They filed their application with the patent office on June 10, 1941, and the patent was granted on August 11, 1942.
Lamarr signed the patent over to the US Army in the hope that it would be used to create torpedoes that the Germans would not be able to stop, but Army officials concluded that the invention was too bulky to be practical.
Lamarr had been ahead of her time. The discovery of transistors in the late 1940s changed things and the updated and more compact device was finally used in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Lamarr's idea of using ever-changing frequencies to avoid interference has ended up being a key part of many of the radio technologies we use today, such as Bluetooth and WiFi connections.
Although Lamarr died three years after her, in 1997 she was living in seclusion in her Florida home and refused to attend the award ceremony, preferring to send a recording of thanks.
