BRAINS & BEAUTY ~ HEDY LAMARR

BRAINS & BEAUTY ~ 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’, society has long ignored her inventive genius.

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler, in Vienna~Austria on 9th November 1914.
An only child, she was born into a well-to-do Jewish family.
Hedy 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.
At only 5 years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music boxes, to understand how the machine operated.

Hedy’s mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age.
Hedy’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt, at the age of 16.
It wasn’t until 1932 that Hedy Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress, for her role in the controversial film, ‘Ecstasy’.

In 1937, Hedy 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.

Hedy 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.
Hedy 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 Hedy, “You’re a genius.”

Hedy was indeed a genius.
As the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn, 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.

Hedy 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.

It wasn’t until Hedy 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.