biography hedy lamarr

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian American actress during MGM's "Golden Age" who also left her mark on technology. She helped develop an early technique for spread spectrum communications.

(1914-2000)

Who Was Hedy Lamarr?

Hedy Lamarr was an actress during MGM's "Golden Age." She starred in such films as Tortilla Flat, Lady of the Tropics, Boom Town and Samson and Delilah , with the likes of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey. Lamarr was also a scientist, co-inventing an early technique for spread spectrum communications — the key to many wireless communications of our present day. A recluse later in life, Lamarr died in her Florida home in 2000.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. Discovered by an Austrian film director as a teenager, she gained international notice in 1933, with her role in the sexually charged Czech film Ecstasy . After her unhappy marriage ended with Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer who sold arms to the Nazis, she fled to the United States and signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood under the name Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film, Algiers , co-starring Charles Boyer, Lamarr became an immediate box-office sensation.

'Secret Communications System'

In 1942, during the heyday of her career, Lamarr earned recognition in a field quite different from entertainment. She and her friend, the composer George Antheil, received a patent for an idea of a radio signaling device, or "Secret Communications System," which was a means of changing radio frequencies to keep enemies from decoding messages. Originally designed to defeat the German Nazis, the system became an important step in the development of technology to maintain the security of both military communications and cellular phones.

Lamarr wasn't instantly recognized for her communications invention since its wide-ranging impact wasn't understood until decades later. However, in 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award, and that same year Lamarr became the first female to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, considered the "Oscars" of inventing.

Later Career

Lamarr's film career began to decline in the 1950s; her last film was 1958's The Female Animal , with Jane Powell. In 1966, she published a steamy best-selling autobiography, Ecstasy and Me , but later sued the publisher for what she saw as errors and distortions perpetrated by the book's ghostwriter. She was arrested twice for shoplifting, once in 1966 and once in 1991, but neither arrest resulted in a conviction.

Personal Life, Death and Legacy

Lamarr was married six times. She adopted a son, James, in 1939, during her second marriage to Gene Markey. She went on to have two biological children, Denise (b. 1945) and Anthony (b. 1947), with her third husband, actor John Loder, who also adopted James.

In 1953, Lamarr completed the naturalization process and became a U.S. citizen.

In her later years, Lamarr lived a reclusive life in Casselberry, a community just north of Orlando, Florida, where she died on January 19, 2000, at the age of 85.

Documentary and Pop Culture

In 2017, director Alexandra Dean shined a light on the Hollywood starlet/unlikely inventor with a new documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story . Along with delving into her pioneering technological work, the documentary explores other examples in which Lamarr proved to be far more than just a pretty face, as well as her struggles with crippling drug addiction.

A dramatized version of Lamarr featured in a March 2018 episode of the TV series Timeless , which centered on her efforts to help the time-traveling team recover a stolen workprint of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane .

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Hedy Lamarr
• Birth Year: 1914
• Birth date: November 9, 1914
• Birth City: Vienna
• Birth Country: Austria
• Best Known For: Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian American actress during MGM's "Golden Age" who also left her mark on technology. She helped develop an early technique for spread spectrum communications.
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Hedy Lamarr was arrested twice for shoplifting, in 1966 and 1991, though neither arrest resulted in a conviction.
• Death Year: 2000
• Death date: January 19, 2000
• Death State: Florida
• Death City: Casselberry
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Hedy Lamarr Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/actors/hedy-lamarr
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 19, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo , society has long ignored her inventive genius.  

Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria on November 9 th , 1914 into a well-to-do Jewish family. An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man, who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He would often take her for long walks where he would discuss the inner-workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars. These conversations guided Lamarr’s thinking and at only 5 years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age. 

Lamarr’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt at age 16. She studied acting with Reinhardt in Berlin and was in her first small film role by 1930, in a German film called Geld auf der Stra βe (“Money on the Street”). However, it wasn’t until 1932 that Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress for her role in the controversial film, Ecstasy .

Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy . Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived. She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” She was incredibly unhappy, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took with her the knowledge gained from dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry.

While in London, Lamarr’s luck took a turn when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, of the famed MGM Studios. With this meeting, she secured her ticket to Hollywood where she mystified American audiences with her grace, beauty, and accent. In Hollywood, Lamarr was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes.

Lamarr dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II.

In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “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.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the axis powers.

The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds. Happy in her adopted country, she became an American citizen in April 1953.

Meanwhile, Lamarr’s patent expired before she ever saw a penny from it. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Bedi, Joyce. “A Movie Star, Some Player Pianos, and Torpedoes.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, November 12, 2015.

Camhi, Leslie. “Hedy Lamarr’s Forgotten, Frustrated Career as a Wartime Inventor.” The New Yorker , December 3, 2017.

DeFore, John. “'Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story': Film Review | Tribeca 2017.” The Hollywood Reporter , April 25, 2017.

“Hedy Lamarr: Biography.” IMDb.com.

“Hedy Lamarr Biography.” Biography.com. April 2, 2014.

“'Most Beautiful Woman' By Day, Inventor By Night.” All Things Considered , NPR, November 22, 2011.

“Women in Science: How Hedy Lamarr Pioneered Modern Wi-Fi Technology.” TEDxUCLWomen. July 30, 2017.

Y.F.. “The incredible inventiveness of Hedy Lamarr.” The Economist, November 23, 2017.

APA: Cheslak, C. (2018, August 30). Hedy Lamarr. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr

MLA: Cheslak, Colleen. “Hedy Lamarr.”  Hedy Lamarr , National Women's History Museum, 30 Aug. 2018, www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr.

Chicago:Cheslak, Colleen. "Hedy Lamarr." Hedy Lamarr. August 30, 2018. https://www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr.

Rhodes, Richard. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World . New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Directed by Alexandra Dean. New York: Zeitgeist Films, November 24, 2017.

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How Hollywood Star Hedy Lamarr Invented the Tech Behind WiFi

By: Dave Roos

Published: March 5, 2024

In the 1940s, few Hollywood actresses were more famous and more famously beautiful than Hedy Lamarr. Yet despite starring in dozens of films and gracing the cover of every Hollywood celebrity magazine, few people knew Hedy was also a gifted inventor. In fact, one of the technologies she co-invented laid a key foundation for future communication systems, including GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi.

“Hedy always felt that people didn't appreciate her for her intelligence—that her beauty got in the way,” says Richard Rhodes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote a biography about Hedy.  

After working 12- or 15-hour days at MGM Studios, Hedy would often skip the Hollywood parties or carousing with one of her many suitors and instead sit down at her “inventing table.”

“Hedy had a drafting table and a whole wall full of engineering books. It was a serious hobby,” says Rhodes, author of Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World .

While not a trained engineer or mathematician, Hedy Lamarr was an ingenious problem-solver. Most of her inventions were practical solutions to everyday problems, like a tissue box attachment for depositing used tissues or a glow-in-the-dark dog collar.

It was during World War II , that she developed “frequency hopping,” an invention that’s now recognized as a fundamental technology for secure communications. She didn’t receive credit for the innovation until very late in life.

Hedy Lamarr's Childhood in Austria

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna, Austria in 1914. She was the only child of a wealthy secular Jewish family. From her father, a bank director, and her mother, a concert pianist, Hedy received a debutante’s education—ballet classes, piano lessons and equestrian training.

There were signs at a young age that Hedy had an engineer’s natural curiosity. On long walks through the bustling streets of Vienna, Hedy’s father would explain how the streetcars worked and how their electricity was generated at the power plant. At five years old, Hedy took apart a music box and reassembled it piece by piece.

“Hedy did not grow up with any technical education, but she did have this personal connection,” says Rhodes. “She loved her father dearly, so it’s easy to see how from that she might have developed an interest in the subject. And also it prepared her to be what she really was, a kind of amateur inventor.”

Hedy's Movie Debut as Teen

Even if Hedy had wanted to be a professional engineer or scientist, that career path wasn’t available to Viennese girls in the 1930s. Instead, teenage Hedy set her sights on the movie industry.

“At 16,” says Rhodes, “Hedy forged a note to her teachers in Vienna saying, ‘My daughter won’t be able to come to school today,’ so she could go down to the biggest movie studio in Europe and walk in the door and say, ‘Hi, I want to be a movie star.’”

Hedy started as a script girl, but quickly earned some walk-on parts. The Austrian director Max Reinhardt took Hedy to Berlin when she starred in a few forgettable films before landing a role at age 18 in a racy film called Ecstasy by the Czech director Gustav Machatý. The film was denounced by Pope Pious XI, banned from Germany and blocked by US Customs authorities for being “dangerously indecent.”

Reinhardt called Hedy “the most beautiful woman in Europe,” and even before Ecstasy , Hedy was turning heads in theater productions across Europe. It was during the Viennese run of a popular play called Sissy that Hedy caught the eye of a wealthy Austrian munitions baron named Fritz Mandl. Hedy and Mandl married in 1933, but the union was stifling from the start. Mandl forced his wife to accompany him as he struck deals with customers, including officials from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, including Mussolini himself.

“She would sit at dinner bored out of her mind with discussions of bombs and torpedoes, and yet she was also absorbing it,” says Rhodes. “Of course, nobody asked her any questions. She was supposed to be beautiful and silent. But I think it was through that experience that she developed her considerable knowledge about how torpedo guidance worked.”

In 1937, Hedy fled her unhappy marriage (Mandl was deeply paranoid that Hedy was cheating on him) and also fled Austria, a country aligned with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.

A New Country and a New Name

Hedy landed in London, where Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios was actively buying up the contracts of Jewish actors who could no longer work safely in Europe. Hedy met with Mayer, but refused his lowball offer of $125 a week for an exclusive MGM contract. In a savvy move, Hedy booked passage to the United States on the luxury liner SS Normandie , the same ship on which Mayer was traveling home.

“She made a point of being seen on deck looking beautiful and playing tennis with some of the handsome guys on board,” says Rhodes. “By the time they got to New York, Hedy had cut a much better deal with Mayer”—$500 a week—“with the proviso that she’d learn how to speak English in six months.”

Mayer had another demand—she had to change her name. Hedwig Kiesler was too German-sounding. Mayer’s wife was a fan of 1920s actress Barbara La Marr (who died tragically at 29 years old), so Mayer decided that his new MGM actor would now be known as Hedy Lamarr.

Actress by Day, Inventor by Night

It didn’t take long for Hedy to emerge as a bright new star in Hollywood. Her breakout role was alongside Charles Boyer (another European transplant) in Algiers (1938). From there, the MGM machine put Hedy to work cranking out multiple feature films a year throughout the 1940s.

“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hedy once quipped. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

As much as Hedy enjoyed her Hollywood stardom, her first love was still tinkering and problem-solving. She found a kindred spirit in Howard Hughes, the film producer and aeronautical engineer. When Hedy shared an idea for a dissolvable tablet that could turn a soldier’s canteen into a soft drink, Hughes lent her a few of his chemists.

But most of Hedy’s work was done at home at her engineering table where she’d sketch designs for creative solutions to practical problems. In addition to the tissue box attachment and the light-up dog collar, Hedy devised a special shower seat for the elderly that swiveled safely out of a bathtub.

“She was an inventor,” says Rhodes. “If you’ve ever been around real inventors, they’re often not people with a particularly deep education. They’re people who think about the world in a certain way. When they find something that doesn’t work right, instead of just swearing or whatever the rest of us do, they figure out how to fix it.”

Lamarr Takes on German U-Boats

In 1940, Hedy was distraught by the news coming out of Europe, where the Nazi war machine was steadily gaining territory and German U-boat submarines were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic. This was a far more difficult problem to fix, but Hedy was determined to do her part in the war effort.

The turning point came when Hedy met a man at a dinner party. George Antheil was an avante-garde music composer who lost his brother in the earliest days of the war. Antheil and Hedy were kindred spirits—two brilliant, if unconventional minds dead set on finding a way to defeat Hitler. But how?

That’s when Rhodes thinks Hedy leaned on the knowledge she picked up years earlier during those boring client dinners with her first husband in Vienna.

“She knew about torpedoes,” says Rhodes. “She knew there was a problem aiming torpedoes. If the British could take out German submarines with torpedoes launched from surface ships or airplanes, they might be able to prevent all of this slaughter that was going on.”

The answer was clearly some type of radio-controlled torpedo, but how would they stop the Germans from simply jamming the radio signal? Hedy and Antheil’s creative solution was inspired, Rhodes believes, by their mutual love of the piano.

Lamarr, Antheil Harness Music to Inspire Invention

During their late-night brainstorming sessions, Hedy and Antheil played a musical game. They’d sit down at the piano together, one person would start playing a popular song and the other would see how quickly they could recognize it and start playing along.

It was here, Rhodes thinks, that Hedy and Antheil first happened upon the idea of frequency hopping. If two musicians are playing the same music, they can hop around the keyboard together in perfect sync. However, if someone listening doesn’t know the song, they have no idea what keys will be pressed next. The “signal,” in other words, was hidden in the constantly changing frequencies.

How did this apply to radio-controlled torpedoes? The Germans could easily jam a single radio frequency, but not a constantly changing “symphony” of frequencies.

In his experimental musical compositions, Antheil had written songs for multiple synchronized player pianos. The pianos played in sync because they were fed the same piano rolls—a type of primitive, cut-out paper program—that controlled which keys were played and when. What if he and Hedy could invent a similar method for synchronizing communications between a torpedo and its controller on a nearby ship?

“All you need are two synchronized clocks that start a tape going at the same moment on the ship and inside the torpedo,” says Rhodes. “The signal between the ship and the torpedo would be continuous, even though it was traveling across a new frequency every split second. The effect for anyone trying to jam the signal is that they wouldn’t know where it was from one moment to the next, because it would ‘hopping’ all over the radio.”

It was Hedy who named their clever system “frequency hopping.”

Navy Rejects Invention

Hedy and Antheil developed their idea with the help of a wartime agency called the National Inventors’ Council , tasked with applying civilian inventions to the war effort. The Council connected Hedy and Antheil with a physicist from the California Institute of Technology who figured out the complex electronics to make it all work.

When their frequency hopping patent was finalized in 1942, Antheil pitched the idea to the U.S. Navy, which was less than receptive.

“What do you want to do, put a player piano in a torpedo? Get out of here!” is how Rhodes describes the Navy’s knee-jerk rejection. It was never given a chance.

Hedy and Antheil’s patent was locked in a safe and labeled “top secret” for the remainder of the war. The two entertainers went back to their day jobs, thinking that was the end of their inventing days. Little did they know that their patent would have a second life.

Frequency Hopping Tech Takes Off

In the 1950s, the electrical manufacturer Sylvania employed frequency hopping to build a secure system for communicating with submarines. And in the early 1960s, the technology was deployed on U.S. warships to prevent Soviet signal jamming during the Cuban Missile Crisis .

Antheil died in 1959, but Hedy lived on, unaware that her ingenious idea was about to take off in a big way.

When car phones first became popular in the 1970s, carriers used frequency hopping to enable hundreds of callers to share a limited spectrum of radio frequencies. The same technology was rolled out for the earliest cell phone networks.

By the 1990s, frequency hopping was so ubiquitous that it became the technology standard required by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for secure radio communications. That’s why Bluetooth, WiFi and other essential technologies are based, at their core, on an idea dreamed up by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil.

“It’s a really deep and fundamental idea,” says Rhodes. “It has broad applications all over the place.”

Over time, Hedy’s Hollywood star fizzled and she retired to Florida, where she continued to tinker with new inventions, including a more “driver-friendly” type of traffic light. It wasn’t until Hedy was in her 80s that a group of engineers realized that the “Hedwig Kiesler Mackay” listed on the frequency hopping patent was none other than the Hollywood legend, Hedy Lamarr.

“Hedy didn’t want money, but she did want recognition,” says Rhodes, “and it really angered her that nobody gave her credit for this important invention. In the 1990s, she finally got an award for her contribution. And Hedy being Hedy, what did she say? ‘Well, it’s about time.’”

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The Beautiful Brilliance of Hedy Lamarr

By Hadley Hall Meares

All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.

“I’ve never been satisfied. I’ve no sooner done one thing than I am seething inside me to do another thing,” Golden Age screen siren Hedy Lamarr once said .

And do things Lamarr did. The stunning star of classics including Algiers and Samson and Delilah was much more than the label she was given, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Married six times, she was an actress, pioneering female producer, ski-resort impresario , painter, art collector, and groundbreaking inventor, whose important innovations are meticulously cataloged in Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes ’s 2012 book, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World .

However, it was another book that would alter the course of Lamarr’s life. Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman , ghostwritten by Cy Rice and Leo Guild (who was also ghostwriter of the notorious Barbara Payton tell-all I Am Not Ashamed ), was released in 1966 and immediately became a best seller.

Based on 50 hours of taped conversations with the eccentric, vulnerable Lamarr, Ecstasy and Me is a grotesquely fascinating chronicle of the way women have been sexualized, minimized, and trivialized throughout history. Though it’s classified as an autobiography, the book starts with a male psychologist proclaiming that the sex-positive Lamarr is “blissfully unaffected by moral standards that our contemporary culture declares acceptable,” and goes on nauseatingly from there.

Lurid, amorous encounters right out of a Roger Corman sexploitation film and sexual trauma disguised as titillation are the main foci of this supposed autobiography, though sometimes it breaks, bizarrely, for transcripts of conversations Lamarr recorded with a psychiatrist. Sprinkled in are standard Hollywood gossip—sometimes catty, occasionally kind portraits of everyone from Judy Garland and Clark Gable to Ingrid Bergman—and inane pronouncements such as “Why Americans suspect bidets, I’ll never know. They are the last word in cleanliness.”

In 2010’s definitive Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr , biographer Stephen Michael Shearer writes that those close to Lamarr believed some of the nonsexual stories in Ecstasy and Me were accurate, with Lamarr’s own voice occasionally breaking through the sensationalist muddle. But they also felt the outlandish sexual stories were complete lies. The reader gets the sense that while Lamarr may have said the things she’s quoted as saying, statements made while she might have been high shouldn’t have been taken at face value. It’s no wonder Lamarr would sue unsuccessfully in an attempt to stop the publication of Ecstasy and Me , which she labeled “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene.” As she told Merv Griffin in 1969, “That’s not my book.”

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, in 1914, to an assimilated Jewish family . In Hedy’s Folly , Rhodes paints a captivating picture of the artistic, intellectual Vienna of Lamarr’s youth, exploring the forces that would shape her (and making the reader wish they could step back in time). While Lamarr’s cultured mother worried that her extraordinarily beautiful, bright, and headstrong only child would grow spoiled, her father, Emil, a prominent banker, coddled and cultivated his precious daughter. “He made me understand that I must make my own decisions, mold my own character, think my own thoughts,” Lamarr later recalled, per Rhodes.

Ecstasy and Me describes Lamarr’s adolescence as a tumultuous time, filled with the trauma of attempted rape, lurid sexual exploits at boarding school, and an affair with her friend’s father that produced “uncountable” orgasms. It fails to mention, though, that when she was a teenager, she was already learning mechanics, and had become a fearless self-promoter and a protégé of theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt.

Buy Ecstasy and Me on Amazon .

At the age of 17, Lamarr was cast in the film that catapulted her to international stardom and infamy: Ecstasy , the project that gave her purported autobiography its title. The movie includes a scene in which Lamarr (who was unaccompanied by her parents during shooting) swimming nude and simulating an orgasm—a first in film history. Some of the only affecting passages in Ecstasy and Me come when Lamarr describes the exploitation she suffered at the hands of powerful men while making films like these.

By Eve Batey

By Savannah Walsh

Most disturbing are her allegations that Ecstasy director Gustav Machatý resorted to cruel methods to get the teenager’s reactive face during her love scene with costar Aribert Mog: 

Aribert took over me, and the scene began again. Aribert slipped down out of range on one side. From down out of range on the other side, the director jabbed that pin into my buttocks “a little” and I reacted…. I remember one shot when the close-up camera caught my face in a distortion of real agony…and the director yelled happily “Ya, goot!”

In 1933, Lamarr married munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. “He had the most amazing brain…. There was nothing he did not know…. Ask him a formula in chemistry and he would give it to you,” she said, per Rhodes.

The union was an unhappy one, though Ecstasy and Me conveniently leaves out crucial details about her relationship to make Lamarr appear blameless. That book describes her marriage as a perverse fairy tale. The much older Mandl did not allow her to act; Lamarr soon found that life with him was little more than a prison, a “gilded cage.”

All of Lamarr’s biographers agree that Mandl was insanely controlling and jealous of his wife’s beauty and infamy. Incensed and embarrassed by Lamarr’s nudity in Ecstasy , he spent a large sum of money in an attempt to buy up all existing copies of the film (he failed).

But Lamarr was not entirely as hopeless as she is portrayed in Ecstasy and Me . Shearer writes in Beautiful that while married, Lamarr had an affair with her husband’s best friend, Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. And according to Rhodes, she was far from the stereotypical trophy wife. Lamarr listened carefully to talk of the German military’s technological innovations as she presided over grand dinners in Starhemberg’s home. One of the most intriguing aspects of Hedy’s Folly is the detailed insight it gives into the big-business world of munitions and armaments, and how it may have influenced Lamarr’s future inventions.

If both Ecstasy and Me and Hedy’s Folly sometimes read more like spy thrillers than nonfiction, it is because what came next for Lamarr was incontestably dramatic. Always a fabulist, Lamarr would tell numerous stories of her attempts to flee Mandl. In Ecstasy and Me, the chosen version is particularly outrageous: that Lamarr hired a maid who looked like her so that she could steal the maid’s identity and sneak out of the house using the servants’ entrance. Lamarr’s son would corroborate this unbelievable story in the excellent, nuanced 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story .

Whatever the truth, though, she did escape—first to Paris, then to London. By 1937, Lamarr was headed to Hollywood, with a contract from MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. Ecstasy and Me paints the exec as a phony, lecherous ham whom Lamarr constantly outsmarts. One can only hope that is true.

By 1940, the newly christened Hedy Lamarr was a bona fide movie star. Disdainful of the Hollywood social whirl, she preferred painting or swimming with her good friend Ann Sothern. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she later said . “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Ecstasy and Me presents these years as times of endless lovemaking and rehashes tired tropes about movie making. But according to Rhodes, Lamarr’s real passions were her inventions. She spent countless nights tinkering in a corner of her Benedict Canyon mansion, which contained drafting boards and gadgets galore. “My mother was very bright minded,” her son Anthony Loder later told the L.A. Times . “She always had solutions. Anytime someone complained about anything, boom, her mind came up with a solution.”

According to that same paper, while dating Howard Hughes, Lamarr worked on plans to streamline his airplanes. She also invented a bouillon cube that produced cola when dropped in plain water. But her real contribution to science arose out of a chance meeting with the flamboyant avant-garde composer and amateur inventor George Antheil (who is heavily profiled in Hedy’s Folly —so much that it makes the reader wish Rhodes would just get back to Lamarr’s story) at the home of movie star Janet Gaynor.

Antheil would later say that Lamarr was initially interested in his claim that he could make her breasts bigger (bosoms are a preoccupation in Ecstasy and Me as well). But the two soon turned their focus to helping the war effort, and began work on an invention based on Lamarr’s theory of “frequency hopping,” which could stop radio systems from being jammed by the enemy, aiding in torpedo launches. In August 1942, the government issued its “secret communication system,” U.S. patent No. 2,292,387. This system would later be used by the U.S. Navy and would be highly influential.

If Hedy’s Folly is sometimes bogged down by scientific and mechanical details, it is at least an overdue overcorrection. Books like Rhodes’s are a necessary revaluation of historical women’s roles as thinkers and game changers, contrasting the narrative that their lives were guided only by romance, physical appearance, and children. It is almost impossible to believe that in 50 hours of interviews, Lamarr never mentioned inventing—but in Ecstasy and Me , her passion is not mentioned once.

So why did this curious, ingenious woman agree to participate in Ecstasy and Me in the first place? By the mid-1960s, Lamarr’s movie stardom and six tumultuous marriages were firmly in the past. She claimed to be broke, and according to the documentary Bombshell, was addicted to methamphetamines ( she was a patient of Max Jacobson, the notorious “ Dr. Feelgood ”). In 1966, Lamarr was arrested at the May Company department store in Los Angeles for allegedly stealing items including two strings of beads, a lipstick brush, and an eye makeup brush. She was later acquitted .

According to Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr , Lamarr received a total of $80,000 for Ecstasy and Me . She signed off on the manuscript without reading it, legally paving the way for its publication.

It was a grave error. The book’s torrid passages are written like classic pornography; they include tales of orgies on sets with starlets and assistant directors, sadomasochism, and a strange story of one lover who had sex with a doll that he had made to look like Lamarr while she watched in horror.

It also includes a few interesting passages discussing her role as a groundbreaking film producer, and defensive yet amusing retellings of her bizarre behavior during her divorce from millionare Texas oilman W. Howard Lee (she sent her stand-in to testify for her in court). But the sex is was what stuck.

Once Lamarr actually bothered to read Ecstasy and Me , she knew her career was done. “I was there when she read Ecstasy and Me for the first time,” TCM’s Robert Osborne recalls in Beautiful . “She was shocked by it. But that was the foolish side of her. She wanted money. They simply made up passages in that book and she allowed them to…. It was part of her capriciousness, giving away parts of her life for a book and not worrying about the consequences.”

Although presiding judge Ralph H. Nutter believed Ecstasy and Me was “filthy, nauseating, and revolting,” he ruled against Lamarr, and the book was published anyway. “The damage it did to Hedy’s career and reputation was irreversible,” Shearer writes in Beautiful . Reading it, one instantly understands why. The cool Austrian film goddess had been knocked off her pedestal, presenting herself (intentionally or not) as a self-professed “nymphomaniac” and an irrational, self-obsessed has-been who bemoans the curse of her great beauty one too many times.

Lamarr eventually moved to Florida. Unable to cope with aging, she became a recluse, obsessed with plastic surgery and pushing her doctors to innovate new techniques in the field. “Hedy retreated from the gazes of those who didn’t look deeper. She…filled her days with activities (and lawsuits) and, with the humor still intact, tolerated the rest of us,” Osborne writes in the forward to Beautiful .

Lamarr rarely saw her children or friends, but instead talked to them on the telephone for hours every day. She also claimed she was writing her autobiography, seemingly trying to erase the pain and embarrassment of Ecstasy and Me from her memory.

As Lamarr hid away, her wartime work in frequency hopping was becoming extremely important. It paved the way for Wi-Fi, cellular technology, and modern satellite systems. Lamarr was aware of these uses, and bitter that her work had not been recognized—nor had she received a cent for her contributions. “I can’t understand why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world,” she said in an influential 1990 Forbes interview , which slowly began to wake the world up to her accomplishments.

In 1997, three years before her death, Lamarr was finally honored with the prestigious Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When she heard of the award, she said to her son simply this: “It’s about time.”

Perhaps it is fitting that it has been so hard to tell Lamarr’s entire story until recently; an extraordinarily beautiful, troubled, brilliant, sexually liberated woman has long been too much for patriarchal society to handle. This is something Lamarr seemed to understand. In a 1969 interview, she explained it to a befuddled Merv Griffin: “I’m a very simple, complicated person.”

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Hedy Lamarr

Celebrated as “the most beautiful woman in the world” during her Hollywood heyday in the 1940s, film star Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) ultimately proved that her brain was even more extraordinary than her beauty. Eager to aid Allied forces during World War II, she explored potential military applications for radio technology. She theorized that varying radio frequencies at irregular intervals would prevent interception or jamming of transmissions, thereby creating an innovative communication system. Lamarr shared her concept for utilizing “frequency hopping” with the U.S. Navy and codeveloped a patent in 1941. Today, Lamarr’s innovation makes possible a wide range of wireless communications technologies, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

James Stewart, Hedy Lamarr, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, and Tony Martin in a Paint Book from Ziegfeld Girl

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Hedy Lamarr: Golden Age Film Star—and Important Inventor

Actor Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) had a fascinating life, including her scandalous debut in the Czech film Ecstasy, discovery (and renaming) by Louis B. Mayer, persona as the most glamorous woman of Hollywood's Golden Age, and relative obscurity in her later years.

But far beyond the Hollywood image, Lamarr was an inventor.

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. Her father was the director of a bank and her Hungarian mother was a concert pianist.

During a small dinner party in 1940, Lamarr met a kindred inventive spirit in George Antheil. The Trenton, New Jersey, native was known for his writing, his film scores—especially his avant-garde music compositions—but he was also an inventor.

Lamarr wanted to aid the Allied forces during World War II. She explored potential military applications for radio technology. She theorized that varying radio frequencies at irregular intervals would prevent interception or jamming of transmissions, thereby creating an innovative communication system.

Lamarr shared her concept for using “frequency hopping” with the U.S. Navy and codeveloped a patent with Antheil 1941. Today, her innovation helped make possible a wide range of wireless communications technologies, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

This image is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Read more about Lamarr’s story and inventions in this blog post by Joyce Bedi for the museum’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

An image of Lamarr’s patent can be viewed online at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

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Hedy Lamarr Biography

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Austrian-born American actress Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000) was among the leading screen sirens of Hollywood in the 1940s. Her life was an eventful one that involved six marriages, a groundbreaking electronic invention, and several cinematic milestones.

Born to Bank Director and Pianist

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, on November 9, 1913. Her family was Jewish and well off; her father was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother a concert pianist. Lamarr attended schools in Vienna and was sent to a finishing school in Switzerland as a teenager. By that time she was already unusually beautiful, attracting the attention of both prospective lovers and film producers. After an unsuccessful audition with famed stage director, Max Reinhardt, from whom she had taken acting lessons, Lamarr moved into films. Her screen career began in 1930 with a pair of Austrian films, Money on the Street and Storm in a Waterglass .

She had several other small roles in German-language films, but it took controversy to put Lamarr on the cinematic map. In 1932 she made a film called Extase (or Ecstasy) in Czechoslovakia; it was released the following year. The film told the simple story of a young woman whose husband is impotent, causing her to seek out the companionship of a younger man. Two scenes were responsible for the film's notoriety and quick banning by Austrian censors: one in which Lamarr runs nude through a sunlit forest, the other a sex scene in which she seems to experience orgasm (her intense facial expressions actually resulted from the application of a safety pin to her buttock by director Gustav Machaty). Lamarr later said that she had been a naive young woman pressured into doing these scenes, but cameraman Jan Stallich told Jan Christopher Horak of CineAction that "as the star of the picture, she knew she would have to appear naked in some scenes. She never made any fuss about it during the production."

Controversy and condemnation from Pope Pius XI temporarily halted Lamarr's film career, but Extase did attract the attention of millionaire Austrian arms dealer Fritz Mandl, whom Lamarr met in December of 1933 and then married. Mandl had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to be able to do business with Germany's fascist regime (he was nevertheless exiled to Argentina after Austria came under German control in 1938), and Lamarr also made her religious conversion in 1933. An often-repeated story holds that Mandl tried to buy and destroy every outstanding copy of Extase , but this is thought to be legend rather than fact. Whether out of revulsion toward her husband's politics or from sheer restlessness, Lamarr packed a single suitcase with jewelry, drugged her maid, and fled to Paris and then London in 1937. That September she sailed for New York.

On board, she began negotiating with producer Louis B. Mayer of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M) studio, who had signed Swedish actress Greta Garbo several years earlier and was on the lookout for exotic European talent. Lamarr had refused Mayer's contract offer in London, but by the time the ship docked in New York she had a $500-a-week contract and the new name of Hedy Lamarr—up to that point she had used Hedi Kiesler. Mayer devised the name, inspired by that of silent film actress Barbara La Marr.

Starred Opposite Charles Boyer

Lamarr's first film in the United States was Algiers (1938), in which she played opposite French actor Charles Boyer as a woman who, though engaged to another man, has an affair with an escaped thief (Boyer). The film was a successful launch for Lamarr's American career, but it was followed by two flops, Lady of the Tropics (1939) and I Take This Woman (1940), the latter co-starring Spencer Tracy and dubbed I Re-Take This Woman after Mayer demanded numerous changes in the script. The actress's fortunes turned around later in 1940 with Boom Town , with Clark Gable in the lead role, and Comrade X , a sort of anti-Communist romance in which Lamarr played a Soviet streetcar driver who falls in love with an American reporter (Clark Gable).

Throughout World War II, Lamarr was a fixture on American movie screens with such films as Come Live with Me (1941), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), and the steamy White Cargo (1943), in which Lamarr played a mixed-race prostitute on an African rubber plantation (although censors demanded that references to her character's ethnicity be removed from the script). With such films as 1943's The Heavenly Body (the title ostensibly referred to astronomy), Lamarr emerged in the first rank of screen sex symbols. A poll of Columbia University male undergraduates ranked Lamarr as the actress they would most like to be marooned with on an island, and in 1942 Lamarr participated in the World War II mobilization effort by offering to kiss any man who would purchase $25,000 in War Bonds. She raised $17 million with 680 kisses. In 1943, Lamarr was rumored to have been in the running for (or to have turned down) the role that eventually went to Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca .

Lamarr had plenty of space in celebrity gossip columns to go with her screen stardom. She dated silent comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1941, and had flings with Burgess Meredith and several other actors. Lamarr married producer Gene Markey in 1939, divorcing him the following year. For four years she was married to English actor John Loder and had two children by him. Later in life Lamarr was married three more times, to bandleader Teddy Stauffer, Texas oil magnate Howard Lee, and lawyer Lewis Boles. All her marriages ended in divorce. Another man with whom Lamarr may have been romantically involved was composer George Antheil.

Antheil played an important role in Lamarr's life in another way as well—as a collaborator on an important electronics innovation. Lamarr was slightly dismissive of her glamorous image, saying (according to her U.S. News & World Report obituary), "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." Lamar, by contrast, had been astute enough to pick up a good deal of practical knowledge pertaining to munitions engineering during her marriage to Mandl. In 1940 she had the idea for a solution to the problem of controlling a radio-guided torpedo. At that time, electronic data broadcast on a specific frequency could easily be jammed by enemy transmitters. Lamarr suggested rapid changes in the broadcast frequency, and Antheil, who had experimented with electronic musical instruments, devised a punch-card-like device, similar to a player-piano roll, that could synchronize a transmitter and receiver. The system Lamarr and Antheil invented relied on using 88 frequencies, equivalent to the number of keys on a piano.

Realized No Money from Invention

The pair were jointly awarded a patent for their discovery, but Antheil later credited the original idea entirely to Lamarr. Credit did not matter, however, for the idea, later given the name of frequency hopping, was never applied by the military during World War II. It was later rediscovered independently and used in ships sent to Cuba during the missile crisis of 1962. The real payoff of frequency hopping came only decades later, when it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Bluetooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. By that time, Lamarr and Antheil's patent had long since expired.

Experiment Perilous (1944), directed by Jacques Tourneur, was considered one of Lamarr's best films, but her career gradually declined after World War II. The most visible outing from this phase of her career was the Cecil B. DeMille-produced Samson and Delilah (1949), with Victor Mature and Lamarr in the title roles. The film, in Horak's words, "marries an Old Testament-style, evangelical Christian moralism with the theatrical exploitation of unadulterated sex." For David Thomson of London's Independent on Sunday , the film had "many moments where [Lamarr's] foreign voice, her basilisk gaze, and her sinful body combine to magnificent effect."

Lamarr made several films in the 1950s, mostly operating outside of the Hollywood system. In the 1954 Italian-made feature The Loves of Three Queens she played Helen of Troy, and she took on another historical role as Joan of Arc in The Story of Mankind (1958). Her heyday was past, however, and she stayed away from Hollywood for much of the time. In 1950 she sold off all of her possessions in an auction and announced that she was moving to Mexico. A marriage brought her back to the United States and to Texas in 1955, and in retirement she moved to Florida. Occasionally she appeared on television. In 1967 she published an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman , but sued the ghostwriters she had employed, claiming (according to Thomson), that the book was "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene."

That was one of several episodes that saw Lamarr entering courtrooms in her later years. Lamarr was arrested in 1966 for shoplifting at Macy's department store, but was acquitted. She complained to a columnist that she had once had a $7 million income but by the late 1960s was subsisting on a $48-a-week pension. Another round of litigation came after the release of director Mel Brooks's Western film parody Blazing Saddles in 1974; the actress objected to the fanciful "Hedley Lamarr" name of one of the movie's characters.

Lamarr lived mostly in isolation in a small house in Orlando in the last years of her life, reportedly staying out of the spotlight partly because of unsuccessful plastic surgery. She antagonized the organizers of a film festival with unreasonable demands for a makeup retinue. In 1990, however, she had a cameo role in the satire Instant Karma , and she lived long enough to see a modest renewal of interest in the sexually independent persona she had often projected on film. The story of her radio transmission invention also became widely publicized in the 1990s, and she received an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, although she never received any monetary award for her ingenuity. On January 19, 2000, Hedy Lamarr died at her home in Orlando.

Lamarr, Hedy, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman , Fawcett, 1967.

World of Invention , 2nd ed., Gale, 1999.

Young, Christopher, The Films of Hedy Lamarr , Citadel, 1978.

Periodicals

CineAction , Spring 2001.

Economist , June 21, 2003.

Entertainment Weekly , February 4, 2000.

Forbes , May 14, 1990.

Independent on Sunday (London, England), January 30, 2005.

People , February 7, 2000.

U.S. News & World Report , January 31, 2000.

"Hedy Lamarr," All Movie Guide , http://www.allmovie.com (January 20, 2007).

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Pieces of History

The World War II-Era Actress Who Invented Wi-Fi: Hedy Lamarr

Today’s post comes from Lori Norris, an archives technician a the National Archives at College Park.

As we face the uncertainty of the current COVID-19 pandemic, one helpful invention has eased the anxieties of staying at home and assists us daily with our new teleworking lives. Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, allows us to stay plugged into the internet while roaming our homes for the perfect spot to type up emails or binge-watch our favorite shows. As with the invention of the computer, the technology that made Wi-Fi possible came about during another devastating global event: World War II. The head inventor wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but a famous Hollywood actress with an obsession with tinkering.

Hedy Lamarr made it big in acting before ever moving to the United States. Her role in the Czech film Ecstasy got international attention in 1933 for containing scandalous, intimate scenes that were unheard of in the movie industry up until then.

Backlash from her early acting career was the least of her worries, however, as tensions began to rise in Europe. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, grew up in a Catholic household in Austria, but both of her parents had a Jewish heritage. In addition, she was married to Friedrich Mandl, a rich ammunition manufacturer with connections to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.  

Her time with Friedrich Mandl was bittersweet. While the romance quickly died and Mandl became very possessive of his young wife, Lamarr was often taken to meetings on scientific innovations in the military world. These meetings are said to have been the spark that led to her becoming an inventor. As tensions in both her household and in the world around her became overwhelming, she fled Europe and found her way to the United States through a job offer from Hollywood’s MGM Studios.

Lamarr became one of the most sought-after leading women in Hollywood and starred in popular movies like the 1939 film Algiers , but once the United States began helping the Allies and preparing to possibly enter the war, Lamarr almost left Hollywood forever. Her eyes were no longer fixed on the bright lights of the film set but on the flashes of bombs and gunfire. Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors’ Council in Washington, DC, where she thought she would be of better service to the war effort.

Lamarr’s path to inventing the cornerstone of Wi-Fi began when she heard about the Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes. She recruited George Antheil, a composer she met through MGM Studios, in order to create what was known as a Secret Communication System.

The idea behind the invention was to create a system that constantly changed frequencies, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the radio messages. The invention would help the Navy make their torpedo systems become more stealthy and make it less likely for the torpedoes to be rendered useless by enemies. 

Lamarr was the brains behind the invention, with her background knowledge in ammunition, and Antheil was the artist that brought it to life, using the piano for inspiration. In 1942, under her then-married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, she filed for a patent for the Secret Communication System, patent case file 2,292,387, and proposed it to the Navy.

The first part of Lamarr and Antheil’s Secret Communication System story did not see a happy Hollywood ending. The Navy refused to accept the new technology during World War II. Not only did the invention come from a civilian, but it was complex and ahead of its time.  

As the invention sat unused, Lamarr continued on in Hollywood and found other ways to help with the war effort, such as working with the USO. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s Hollywood career came to an end that her invention started gaining notice.  

Around the time Lamarr filmed her last scene with the 1958 film The Female Animal , her patented invention caught the attention of other innovators in technology. The Secret Communication System saw use in the 1950s during the development of CDMA network technology in the private sector, while the Navy officially adopted the technology in the 1960s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The methods described in the patent assisted greatly in the development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Despite the world finally embracing the methods of the patent as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, the Lamarr-Antheil duo were not recognized and awarded for their invention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. They both received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, and in 2014 they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Hedy Lamarr never had any formal training yet was able to incorporate her life experiences and artistic imagination into one of the most important inventions of the technological age. During a dark, chaotic time, she was able to adopt the inspiration to try to help change the world for the better.  

As we sit at home, waiting for the war against COVID-19 to reach its turning point, some may draw inspiration from Hedy Lamarr and ask themselves: what can I create today?

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30 thoughts on “ the world war ii-era actress who invented wi-fi: hedy lamarr ”.

I love this story! I had no idea this beloved actress from my time had such talent. Even more amazing is that she had the determination and guts to follow through in an era when women’s thoughts and ideas were never acknowledged. I’m not surprised the Navy did not recognize the value of her contribution then and thrilled to know her invention was adopted eventually.

How inspiring!

❤️👍🇺🇸🙏

You are so right ……………….

Totally amazed by the brains and beauty of the woman Hedy Lemarr was. She is the woman all girls in school should be exposed to now. Individual freedom should be pressed on the young woman of today, not the perversions that are pushed today.

Why people forget real heroes and their contribution?

Once again a woman’s contribution was overlooked.

she’s a woman and then the military’s greed but the president could have stepped in ? her children suffered and she still went on with hopes that the government would do the right thing even now they’ve not given her full recognition

I love that she received recognition for her invention at the end of her life. It makes me so happy to know this even though her brilliant creation is better known today, 20 years after her death. What a remarkable, intelligent, resilient lady. She was the “most beautiful woman in the world” and so much more.

The Jewish museum in Vienna has an exhibition on show titled Lady Bluetooth. Hedy Lamarr. They will reopen on May 31, the show ends on November 8.

Even though she came up with frequency hopping as a method of avoiding detection and securing a radio link, it is a giant leap of reasoning to state that this had anything to do with present day WiFi, point to point microwave or cellular, which are also attributed to this invention. Actually a contemporary of hers, Claude Shannon at Bell Labs, was really the brains behind the development of the modern technologies of forward error correction, digital coding and spread spectrum.

Lol despite whatever wireless technology may be in use today, it is an unfathomable leap for a major motion picture leading lady to recruit a Hollywood musician to collaborate on and successfully develop then patent ingenious defensive tech which was too advanced for the US military to even understand what it was and why they needed it. This was HER HOBBY.

No, LaMarr and Antheil did NOT invent frequency-hopping spread spectrum! That honor should probably go to Tesla (patent #723,188, awarded in 1903, quite a few years before LaMarr was even born). The Germans already made use of it in the First World War. LaMarr and Antheil used spread spectrum in their patent. Wifi does not use frequency-hopping spread spectrum, but direct-sequence spread spectrum, invented by a Swiss guy. Frequency-hopping is easy to understand (it’s like receiver and transmitter doing channel surfing, according to a pre-agreed plan). Direct-sequence spread spectrum and other spread spectrum methods take a lot of prior training to understand, so many people are hoodwinked to believe that LaMarr is the mother of wifi. The Swiss guy who invented direct-sequence spread spectrum should probably be called the father of wifi.

Modern Wi-Fi does not use frequency hopping, as Hedy Lamarr envisioned, and indeed though it was present in the original 802.11 Wi-Fi spec, it was removed in the 802.11b standard.

However, frequency hopping IS used even today in Bluetooth, so it would be more accurate to say that without her work there may well have been no Bluetooth.

Likewise, frequency hopping forms the basis of cellular phone networks as well, another technology that may not have become prevalent without Ms. Lamarr’s work.

Wrong, the inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum was Tesla (patent #723,188, awarded in 1903, quite a few years before LaMarr was even born). Spread spectrum was already used by the Germans in the First World War and also the German company Telefunken before that. Even bluetooth does not use LaMarr’s idea of frequency-hopping: Bluetooth uses ADAPTIVE frequency hopping. So, bluetooth would have existed without LaMarr. As for cellular communications not existing without LaMarr, which cellular standard uses frequency hopping today? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_standards

A very interesting article. It is just a shame that Frequency Hopping is not used in Wi-Fi, so the title is so wrong. Frequenc hopping was part of the original Wi-Fi standard as an option but was never used and was removed within 2 years. I would suggest that you look at Bluetooth which does use frequency hopping

For more, see the documentary ‘Bombshell’ which is now I think available on Netflix!

Great Post! You really do have a way with words.

Some source citations would have enhanced this article.

A very informative and fun read! It’ll be interesting to see what inventions arise out of our current pandemic!

great post, I was searching for this type of content and finally, I got it. Thanks for sharing this useful information.

Hello, It was a good experience while reading your blogs. Thanks for sharing with us.

I am looking for a photo of Hedy Lamarr in Austria at dinner with Hitler and German officersI have seen this photo.

Great information. You provided us such an excellent piece to read.

Having been 10 years old when the 2WW started and the Germans were sinking a lot of our ships in 42 because of not being able to scam bell radio signals the navy did use this to keep from being found in the deep blue sea , Have also read that Hedy had spent 30 million during her life time when a million was worth something ,not a penny on the dollar.

Her comments are so true, and I loved reading them as well, Its a pity she’s not alive today. I sure she could fix that Russian Leader, who’s up to NO good at this time …..

“Invented WiFi”? Are you nuts? That’s closer to “absolutely false” than it is to “a huge exaggeration”.

I don’t think you understand how any of this works. Technology builds upon itself, first it was AM Radio, then FM Radio, then Side Band, then Frequency Hopping Radio.

Can you imagine 4 billion cellular customers all trying to occupy a single frequency around 2GHz? It simply would not work.

You don’t get this, give it up.

I’m doing Hedy Lamarr as my History Day project for school. She is a very interesting person! Did you know that she sold 25 million dollars in war bonds.

I have been telling people about Hedy Lamar for years, and collected everything I could find. She was brilliant, before she was an actress. I read that Mandl took her to all the meetings he went to with high ranking Nazi’s and Germans as ” arm candy” because she was young and beautiful. But during those meetings she took in what she heard and saw. She hated Mandl, and the Nazi Party, left him and sailed to America. Supposedly, she met Antiell on the ship, and she began sketching out her ideas. She also documented the information she acquired at the Nazi meetings and turned it over to the American military. Scientist and technologist have said her multi-frequency hopping invention was the ” backbone of wireless communication” She excelled as an actress, singer, dancer and inventer. She was named ” The most beautiful woman in the world” She was my parents favorite actress. The only area of her life that did not work out for her was her love life. She was married seven times. It was believed that her intellect, and her popularity was more than the men could match.

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The Hedy Lamarr Invention: The Hollywood Starlet Turned Inventor

By Rayan - Jun 21, 2023 | Updated On: 02 July, 2023 | 4 min read

By Rayan , 4 min read - Jun 21, 2023

Updated On: 02 July, 2023

Hedy Lamarr Invention. image Source: Instagram.

Hedy Lamarr  was not only a renowned Hollywood starlet but also a brilliant inventor who made significant contributions to wireless communication technology. Despite facing various challenges in her personal life and career, Lamarr’s innovative mind and determination led her to develop a ground-breaking invention that paved the way for modern-day technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In this article, we will explore Hedy Lamarr Invention and her life, focusing on her remarkable invention and the impact it has had on the world of technology.

The Rise of a Hollywood Starlet: Hedy Lamarr’s Early Life and Career

Hedy Lamarr was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. Her parents were both Jewish and encouraged her interest in acting and the arts from an early age. Lamarr’s first acting role came when she was just 17 years old, in a controversial Czech film called  Ecstasy  (1933). The film’s nudity and sexual content caused a stir at the time, but it also brought Lamarr international attention and launched her career as a Hollywood actress.

In 1937, Lamarr signed a contract with  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer  (MGM) and moved to the United States, where she quickly became known for her beauty and talent. She appeared in numerous films throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including  Algiers  (1938),  Boom Town  (1940), and  Samson and Delilah  (1949). Lamarr’s on-screen presence and charisma made her a popular leading lady and one of the highest-paid actresses of her time.

Despite her success in Hollywood, Lamarr was also interested in science and technology. During World War II, she became involved in efforts to support the U.S. military, including selling war bonds and entertaining troops. It was during this time that Lamarr began to develop her groundbreaking invention, which would pave the way for modern wireless communication technology. But the story of Lamarr’s invention and its impact is a topic for another subheading.

The Development of Frequency Hopping: Lamarr’s Invention and Its Significance

During World War II, Hedy Lamarr began to  develop a technology  with composer  George Antheil  that would allow radio-controlled torpedoes to be guided without interference from enemy jamming. The idea was to use a technique called “frequency hopping,” which involved rapidly switching the frequency of a radio signal so that it couldn’t be detected or jammed by an enemy.

Lamarr and Antheil received a  patent  for their invention in 1942, but at the time, the U.S. Navy did not see the value in the technology, and it was not put into use during the war. However, the principles of frequency hopping laid the groundwork for modern-day technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Later, the U.S. military began to use frequency hopping for secure communication, and the technology has since become a cornerstone of wireless communication. Lamarr’s invention was truly ahead of its time, and her work has been  recognized  as a significant contribution to the field of technology.

However, despite the importance of frequency hopping, Hedy Lamarr invention did not receive recognition for her invention until many years later. In fact, she did not receive any royalties for her invention and its use in modern technology until the 1990s, when her patent had already expired.

The Challenges of Recognition: Lamarr’s Struggle for Credit and Patent Approval

Despite the significance of Hedy Lamarr’s invention, she faced numerous challenges in receiving recognition and credit for her work. When Lamarr and George Antheil submitted their patent application for frequency hopping in  1941 , they faced significant opposition from the U.S. Navy, who saw no value in the technology. The patent was eventually granted in 1942 but was not put into use during the war.

In the years that followed, Lamarr struggled to get recognition for her invention. She was often dismissed as just a pretty face and was not taken seriously as a scientist or inventor. Lamarr also faced numerous personal and financial challenges, including several failed marriages.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that Lamarr’s work began to receive recognition. The U.S. military began to use frequency hopping for secure communication, and Lamarr’s invention was finally seen as a valuable contribution to the field of technology. In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were  honored  with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for their work on frequency hopping.

Despite this recognition, Lamarr did not receive any royalties for her invention and its use in modern technology until the 1990s, when her patent had already expired. Lamarr passed away in 2000, but her legacy as a trailblazing inventor and Hollywood icon continues to inspire and influence people around the world.

The Enduring Legacy of Hedy Lamarr: Inspiring Future Generations of Inventors and Innovators

Hedy Lamarr’s legacy as a Hollywood starlet turned inventor continues to inspire and influence future generations of inventors and innovators.

Hedy’s groundbreaking work on frequency hopping paved the way for modern wireless communication technology, and her perseverance in the face of adversity serves as an inspiration to all those who face challenges in their personal and professional lives.

Lamarr’s contributions to science and technology have been recognized by numerous organizations and institutions. In addition to the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, Lamarr was posthumously  inducted  into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 for her work on frequency hopping . 

Hedy Lamarr invention has also been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, and films. In 2017, the documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” premiered, providing a comprehensive look at Lamarr’s life, career, and invention. The film highlights the challenges Lamarr faced as a woman in a male-dominated field and the enduring impact of her work on modern technology.

In the end, Hedy Lamarr’s enduring legacy is a testament to the power of innovation and the potential for greatness that exists within all of us, regardless of our backgrounds or circumstances.

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IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 216

• 4 wins & 1 nomination

• Jenny Hager

• Princess Veronica

• Dolores Sweets Ramirez

• Vanessa Windsor

• Consuela Bowers

• Joan of Arc

• (scenes deleted)

• Imperatrice Giuseppina
• Genoveffa di Brabante
• Hedy Windsor

• Elana di Troia
• Empress Josephine ...

• Lily Dalbray

• Marianne Lorress

• Lisa Roselle

• Dr. J.O. Loring

• Madeleine Damien
• executive producer

• stand-in: Nancy Kelly (uncredited)

Personal details

• Official Site
• Hedwig Kiesler
• 5′ 7″ (1.70 m)
• November 9 , 1914
• Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
• January 19 , 2000
• Casselberry, Florida, USA (natural causes)
• Spouses Lewis William Boies Jr. March 4, 1963 - June 21, 1965 (divorced)
• Children James Lamarr Markey
• Parents Emil Kiesler
• Other works (7/13/42) Radio: Appeared in a "Lux Radio Theater" production of "H.M. Pulham, Esq."
• 3 Biographical Movies
• 9 Print Biographies
• 4 Portrayals
• 17 Articles
• 28 Pictorials
• 18 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia Inspired by an early Philco wireless radio remote and player piano rolls, she worked with composer George Antheil (who created a symphony played by eight synchronized player pianos) she invented a frequency-hopping system for remotely controlling torpedoes during World War II. (The frequency hopping concept appeared as early as 1903 in a U.S. Patent by Nikola Tesla). The invention was examined superficially and filed away. At the time, Allied torpedoes, as well as those of the Axis powers, were unguided. Input for depth, speed, and direction were made moments before launch but once leaving the submarine the torpedo received no further input. In 1959 it was developed for controlling drones that would later be used in Viet Nam. Frequency hopping radio became a Navy standard by 1960. Due to the expiration of the patent and Lamarr's unawareness of time limits for filing claims, she was never compensated. Her invention is used today for WiFi, Bluetooth, and even top secret military defense satellites. While the current estimate of the value of the invention is approximately $30 billion, during her final years she was getting by on SAG and social security checks totaling only $300 a month.
• Quotes I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere, there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.
• Trademarks Natural brunette hair
• Hollywood's Loveliest Legendary Lady
• Queen of Glamour
• Salaries A Lady Without Passport ( 1950 ) $90,000
• When did Hedy Lamarr die?
• How did Hedy Lamarr die?
• How old was Hedy Lamarr when she died?

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Hedy Lamarr

The Official Website of Hedy Lamarr

HEDY LAMARR

Brains & beauty, jeff beck and johnny depp - this is a song for miss hedy lamarr [official music video].

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp have collaborated on a new album, “18,” which draws its title from the youthful spirit and creativity they discovered in recording together. The musical soulmates have released the lead single from the album, “This Is A Song For Miss Hedy Lamarr,” an homage to the actress/inventor.

Paintings by Denise Loder-DeLuca

Denise Loder-DeLuca is an established artist who has done a series of paintings of her mother, Hollywood actress (inventor, & artist) HEDY LAMARR .

About Hedy Lamarr

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. At 17 years old, Hedy starred in her first film, a German project called  Geld auf der Strase . Hedy continued her film career by working on both German and Czechoslavakian productions. The 1932 German film  Exstase  brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers, and she soon signed a contract with MGM.

“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.”

Bombshell: the hedy lamarr story.

What do the most ravishingly beautiful actress of the 1930s and 40s and the inventor whose concepts were the basis of cell phone and bluetooth technology have in common? They are both Hedy Lamarr, the glamour icon whose ravishing visage was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman and a technological trailblazer who perfected a secure radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during WWII. Weaving interviews and clips with never-before-heard audio tapes of Hedy speaking on the record about her incredible life—from her beginnings as an Austrian Jewish emigre to her scandalous nude scene in the 1933 film  Ecstasy  to her glittering Hollywood life to her ground-breaking, but completely uncredited inventions to her latter years when she became a recluse, impoverished and almost forgotten—BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY brings to light the story of an unusual and accomplished woman, spurned as too beautiful to be smart, but a role model to this day.

Filmography

Often called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Film,” Hedy Lamarr’s beauty and screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her day. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years.

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By Hannah L. Miller Leaders Staff

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Hannah L. Miller, MA, is the senior editor for Leaders Media. Since graduating with her Master of Arts in 2015,...

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Updated Aug 30, 2022

How Hedy Lamarr and Her Inventions Changed the World

What did hedy lamarr invent, the highlights of lamarr’s life, a deeper look into hedy lamarr’s inventions, the long road to a proper legacy.

• Defining the "Think Big Anyway" Mentality

Hedy Lamarr was the type of woman judgmental people love to underestimate. With her hazy green eyes, jet black hair, full lips, and coy smile, she was once known as the most beautiful woman in the world. Her looks were so captivating that she captured the attention of Hollywood producers in the 1930s and 1940s. However, as Lamarr once said, “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks . . .” This especially rang true with her. Although she became typecast as the exotic, seductive femme fatale, she was one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century , embodying the phrase “women in tech” before the concept even existed.

People tend to recognize true genius after a person is long gone—just ask Galileo, Thoreau, Van Gogh, and Tesla. Despite the fame that she experienced as a glamorous actress, Lamarr was no exception to the rule. She died as a hermit with little money to her name, although she invented the technology that powers so much of our world today .

If you’re reading this article on a smartphone or computer hooked up to WiFi, take a moment to learn more about the woman that made this feat possible.

Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress and inventor from Vienna, Austria, who developed frequency hopping—the technology behind WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Until recently, her legacy was nothing short of shallow. She was just one of the many beautiful actresses who graced the screen during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Yet, in reality, historians should write Lamarr into history books as one of the most influential figures in the field of modern technology.

Before getting too deep into the Hedy Lamarr inventions, it’s important to first understand her background. Find out more about her and the reason she became an innovator below.

Hedy Lamarr is born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish family. Her father was a banker and her mother was a concert pianist. 

Lamarr begins her acting career. Her roles become progressively more important. In 1933, she received international recognition as the lead in  Ecstasy . Despite a great performance, the film included explicit content such as nudity, creating a reputation she never seemed to shake. 

At this time, Lamarr also married her first husband, Freidrich Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer. The marriage was unhappy and short-lived. Lamarr ended up hiring a maid, drugging her, stealing her uniform, and running away from Mandl. 

Lamarr meets Louis Mayer, a famous Hollywood executive, in London. Shortly thereafter, she secures a contract with MGM and moves to the United States. 

During her contract with MGM, Lamarr becomes one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies. She is marketed as the “most beautiful woman in the world.” Her most famous films include:  Algiers ,  Boom Town ,  Comrade X ,  Ziegfeld Girls ,  White Cargo , and  Her Highness and the Bellboy . Some of her fellow castmates included stars like Charles Boyer, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland. 

However, Lamarr wasn’t fulfilled by living life solely as a beautiful woman and famous actress. As the U.S. got involved in World War II, she decided to put her inventive mind to the test to help out with the war effort. 

Her marriage to Mandl, a key player in providing weapons to the Axis powers, proved valuable. The couple often hosted dinner parties that included top-ranking Nazi and fascist officials. Her husband was in close contact with both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, both of which Lamarr met. 

As Mandl’s wife, she gained access to secret intelligence. Understanding the type of military technology the enemy used produced her idea for the frequency hopping signal. Many modern technologies used today, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS, would not be possible without this invention. Because of this, people should mention Hedy Lamarr and WiFi in the same breath. 

Lamarr makes a string of other films. However, she received fewer leading roles, and eventually ended her movie-making career in 1958. 

The Years Preceding Her Passing

Following her tenure as a Hollywood actress, Lamarr gave a few interviews and even had an autobiography published in her name (although she later sued the ghostwriter for saying most of the book was fiction).

Sadly, the remainder of her life carried a melancholy tune. She had a total of six marriages, lost the relationship with her son, went to jail for shoplifting, never received the compensation she deserved for her key invention , and lived her later years in life as a recluse.

She passed away in 2000. As requested, her family spread her ashes in Vienna, at the foothills of the Northern Alps.

“Improving things comes naturally to me,” Hedy Lamarr said of herself. Inventing was her method of switching from entertainer to entertained. Her mind was full of infinite possibilities. There was always something to learn, redesign, make excellent, or advance forward. 

Redesigning Faster Airplanes During WWII

On the eve of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, one of Lamarr’s boyfriends, aviation tycoon Howard Hughes, took note of her brilliance. His new partner’s creativity and intelligence astounded him, causing the businessman to introduce her to his aerodynamics team so she could help advance the planes.

Whether working from her movie set trailer or at-home lab, Lamarr fought boredom by engineering the design of faster aircraft. After analyzing the shapes of the world’s quickest fish and birds, she created a more economical, speedier wing design for Hughes.

Hedy Lamarr and WiFi

You might be wondering who invented WiFi. While Lamarr wasn’t technically the WiFi inventor, she conceptualized the type of spread spectrum technology that makes it possible. In 1940, she met self-proclaimed “bad boy” composer George Antheil at a dinner party. The two bonded in conversation after discussing how disturbed Lamarr was over the tragic sinking of the SS  City of Benares . Out of the 90 evacuees who were children heading to safety from Britain to Canada, 77 perished due to an enemy torpedo striking the ship. 

Lamarr wouldn’t let this chance meeting go to waste—she wanted to help out and serve in the war efforts. She  provided  Antheil with her phone number by writing it on his windshield in red lipstick. 

Shortly after that, the two worked together on a wireless communication system that prevented enemy forces from “jamming” or blocking the signal that guided the Allies’ torpedoes. She called the invention “frequency hopping” since the system caused radio waves from the transmitter and receiver to change to a new one simultaneously. Hopping from various frequencies made it impossible to find and redirect incoming signals so a torpedo would miss its target. 

Sadly, the U.S. Navy dismissed Lamarr’s contribution, telling her she’d be more useful selling war bonds. Wanting to help in any way she could, she agreed, raising 25 million dollars. 

Fortunately, her invention didn’t go to waste. It was one of the key communication systems used during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, we see ripples of frequency hopping in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Milstar, a network of military communication satellites, also uses the same technology. 

Other Notable Inventions

As Lamarr once said, “All creative people want to do the unexpected.” Her inventions speak to this statement. During her lifetime, she came up with ideas for a chair that revolved in and out of the shower, a better traffic light, a tablet that made drinks carbonated, and a fluorescent dog collar. 

Even though she lived in an age where women had to choose to be beautiful or intelligent, she bravely chose both. Although she didn’t receive the recognition she deserved for her innovative mind while she was alive, her legacy has shifted in recent years.

In 1997, she and her co-inventor of frequency hopping, Antheil, won the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In addition to this, the film  Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story  (2017) drew attention to her significant contributions to modern technology. Since then, articles from  Forbes , the Smithsonian, Biography, PBS, and  The New York Times  have all helped reshape what people choose to remember and honor about Lamarr.

Defining the “ Think Big Anyway ” Mentality

There’s a poem by Kent M. Keith that Lamarr loved reading to her children before bedtime called “ The Paradoxical Commandments .” After learning about her life, it’s easy to see why Lamarr chose these words to instill into her kids. 

The end of the poem reads:

“The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.”

These words were her life philosophy. Even when the world was cruel to her, Lamarr focused on doing good. Her resilience and demand for change and innovation still inspire and motivate people across the globe, even years after her passing.

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How Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr contributed to developing the WiFi technology in 1940s

Famous individuals often carry a different personality other than their public image. Behind the glitz and glam, they usually possess multifaceted talents and diverse interests. Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr was one such individual who had many talents, per HISTORY . Most people know her for her contributions to the world of cinema. However, it is a commonly unknown fact that Lamarr was a famous inventor.

Richard Rhodes, a historian who wrote her biography, shared: "Hedy always felt that people didn't appreciate her for her intelligence-that her beauty got in the way." Lamarr made a crucial contribution to the world of communication devices, so much so that the technology she made proved helpful in developing the systems of WiFi and Bluetooth that we widely use today. The actress was quite serious about her hobby, having a drafting table and read many engineering books to perfect her craft.

She was not professionally trained to be an engineer or mathematician, but that didn't stop her from coming up with solutions to problems people face throughout their day. Some of these included a tissue-box attachment to keep used tissues and a glow-in-the-dark dog collar. Her most important invention came around the time of World War II when she came up with "frequency hopping." This invention has been credited for being the foundation for the development of secure communications technology in the modern world.

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Although she did find immense success in Hollywood, she always had an interest in invention and engineering. Rhodes spoke about how she was an inventor in a very traditional sense. People who have been around real inventors will know how most of them only had a basic education. Their desire to invent came from wanting to find solutions for when something doesn't work right. Such a problem came to Lamarr's attention when the Nazis began conquering more territories with the help of their powerful U-boat submarines.

Lamarr was aware that the British could not tackle the German U-boats because there was an issue with aiming the torpedoes that were used to attack them. She began to think about how the British could have a tactical advantage if torpedoes were launched from surface ships or planes. So, there needed to be a torpedo that could be controlled remotely by radio. However, this also posed a problem as the Germans could jam the signal.

The actress got an amazing idea when she met George Antheil, an avante-garde music composer who also wanted to contribute to the war effort. He lost his brother when the war began, so both of them began to work together on the project. The concept they came up with was very simple. Two musicians on different pianos could pick up on the song the other was playing and continue playing it if they knew what the song was. Similarly, if the concept was carried over to torpedos, the Germans could be overwhelmed if they were subject to changing frequencies that they did not know about.

Even though their invention was revolutionary, the American Navy rejected it and both of them went back to their routine lives. However, the technology eventually came to be used by American warships to jam Soviet signals during the Cuban Missile Crisis. After that, frequency hopping became even more popular in the 1970s when phones began to utilize it to allow many callers to communicate over a certain number of radio frequencies. Lamarr finally got recognition for her invention and got an award in 1990.

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