Hedy Lamarr

If you are glad you have Alexa to turn the lights off at night or you cannot picture yourself running in the park without your wireless headphones, there is a Hollywood movie star you may want to thank for that: Hedy Lamarr.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria in 1914 (Wenner 2008), Lamarr grew up to become one of the most popular faces in the MGM studios productions, starring classics such 1949 ‘Samson and Delilah’. Although she was mostly known by her beauty, her acting credits and a few flashy episodes of her personal life, Lamarr was also an inventor who worked on different projects throughout her entire life. Her biggest achievement was a pioneering technology that laid the foundations for later developments that are now part of our daily life, such as bluetooth. The technology is now known as frequency hopping, and it has also inspired devices such as torpedo guiding systems and sonobuoys, buoys used to detect submarines.

Lamarr developed this technology with George Antheil, an American inventor who was mainly known for his work as a composer of music for films. Their patent never produced them any revenues, but it eventually led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, long after their deaths (NIHF).

They developed their design during World War II (Rhodes 2012), in an attempt to contribute to The Allies’ cause. However, the American Navy quickly dismissed using their invention and it was not until many years later that they unburied the patent and handed it out to a contractor who became the first of a series of scientists who would make their own developments inspired by Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency hopping.

Lamarr had curiosity for understanding how things worked and a knack to create her own devices since childhood (George 2019). But she also liked acting, and at only 24 she divorced her first husband, weapon developer Fritz Mandl, to pursue a career abroad. She married other five times and had three children.

Early in her career, she had starred the controversial Czech film ‘Ecstasy’ playing a character that was the first to portray an orgasm in a movie (Britannica). To put some distance from the polemic role, MGM’s founder Louis B. Mayer asked her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr after she booked a ticket to America in the same plane he was taking and convinced him of hiring her during the flight. Lamarr died in 2000 in Florida, after a long career as an actress and an inventor.