There are some people in history who make me feel I have seriously mismanaged my spare time. Hedy Lamarr is one of them.
If you know the name at all, you probably know her as a Hollywood actress. She was a major star during Hollywood’s Golden Age, appearing opposite some of the biggest names of the era and starring in movies such as Samson and Delilah.
She was also extraordinarily beautiful.
I don’t mean reasonably attractive in good lighting, with a skilled makeup artist hovering nearby. Hedy Lamarr was the sort of beautiful that made people stop thinking.
Unfortunately, this included quite a lot of people who really should have kept thinking, because while everyone was staring at her face, Hedy was inventing things.
One of those inventions helped lay groundwork for technology we still use today.
Yes, really.
Hedy Was Bored
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. As a child, she was curious about how things worked. Her father apparently encouraged this curiosity, explaining machinery and technology to her while they walked together.
Then acting got in the way.
That is a somewhat flippant way of putting it, because Hedy’s early life was complicated, dramatic and, in places, worthy of one of the movies she later starred in. She became an actress while still young. She appeared in the controversial European film Ecstasy, married an extremely wealthy Austrian arms manufacturer, Friedrich Mandl, and found herself living in a world of weapons dealers, military technology and powerful men discussing the increasingly dangerous political situation in Europe.
Her marriage was deeply unhappy. Eventually, Hedy escaped both the marriage and Europe, made her way to London, met Louis B. Mayer of MGM, and sailed to America.
By the time she reached Hollywood, she was Hedy Lamarr.
And Hollywood knew exactly what to do with her. Put her in front of a camera. Preferably looking beautiful.
This was a problem, because Hedy had a brain that apparently did not understand the concept of sitting quietly between takes.
She invented for fun.
She kept an inventing table at home. When she was involved with Howard Hughes, who was himself obsessed with engineering and aviation, he gave her equipment she could use in her trailer on movie sets.
So while other actors were doing whatever actors did between takes in the 1930s and 1940s, Hedy tinkered. She considered improved traffic signals. She tried to create a tablet that could be dropped into water to produce a carbonated drink. That one didn’t work terribly well. I find this reassuring.
Because the invention she is remembered for was considerably more impressive.
Then Came the War
Hedy was Austrian-born and had seen the rise of fascism in Europe far more closely than most Americans. She also knew something about weapons technology. Remember the first husband, the arms manufacturer? Hedy had been present while military technology was discussed. She understood one of the problems navies faced with radio-controlled torpedoes.
If you guided a torpedo by radio, the enemy could jam the radio signal. No signal, no guidance. The torpedo was suddenly an extremely expensive and highly explosive object going somewhere other than where you wanted it to go.
Hedy started thinking about the problem. This is the part of her story I love. She wasn’t employed by the military. She wasn’t an engineer. She had no university degree in physics. She was a Hollywood actress.
So, naturally, she decided to tackle secure military communications.
As one does.
Enter the Composer
Hedy worked with George Antheil, an avant-garde composer and pianist. Which does not make the story sound any more sensible, does it? The actress and the composer developed a system in which a radio signal would rapidly jump from one frequency to another.
The transmitter and receiver would jump together, following the same pattern. Anyone trying to jam the signal would have a much harder time doing so because the signal wouldn’t stay obligingly on one frequency.
Antheil’s experience with player pianos helped them devise a method for synchronizing the changes. They called their invention a “Secret Communication System.”
Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil filed for a patent in 1941. The patent—U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387—was granted in August 1942. And the United States Navy promptly did very little with it.
Hedy was encouraged to use her celebrity to sell war bonds instead. Which she did. Very successfully.
I can only imagine how that must have felt. “Thank you for the secure communications system, Miss Lamarr. Now, could you go and be beautiful over there?”
Ahead of Her Time
The technology available in the 1940s made Hedy and George’s system difficult to implement, and the Navy did not adopt it during the war. Their patent eventually expired.
Neither of them made money from the invention.
But the central idea—frequency hopping—didn’t disappear. Later developments in spread-spectrum communications drew upon the same principles. The technological family tree gets complicated, as technological family trees always do, but Hedy’s work is now recognized as an important development in wireless communications.
- Wi-Fi.
- Bluetooth.
- GPS.
- Secure military communications.
The woman Hollywood wanted to stand still and look beautiful had helped develop an idea that pointed toward our wireless world. It took decades for her to receive significant recognition for it. In 1997, Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.
Hedy was in her eighties.
In 2014, fourteen years after her death, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
We Saw What We Expected to See
There is a famous quote attributed to Hedy: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Whether she said it exactly that way or not, the line has survived because it fits her story so painfully well. People looked at Hedy Lamarr and saw a beautiful woman. Hollywood saw a face it could photograph. Audiences saw an exotic European movie star. The military saw a celebrity who could sell war bonds.
Very few people looked at her and saw an inventor. Yet she was inventing all along. Between takes. At home. For entertainment and because she was curious. Because when she encountered a problem, her mind immediately started worrying at it.
I keep coming back to the fact that Hedy had no formal scientific training. I don’t think that diminishes what she achieved. I think it makes her more interesting. She was curious enough to learn. She paid attention.
She listened when technical matters were discussed, even though the men in the room may have assumed the beautiful young wife wasn’t following the conversation. She remembered.
Then, years later, when a problem presented itself, she pulled together ideas from weapons technology, radio communications and player pianos. That is creativity.
It’s also what writers do.
We collect odd facts, half-heard conversations, historical trivia, strange occupations, places we’ve visited and things we once read at two in the morning because we couldn’t sleep. (You should see my notebooks!) Then one day, two completely unrelated ideas bump into each other. And we think: Oh, what if…?
Hedy Lamarr understood the power of what if. Hollywood just took a very long time to notice.
I wonder how many other women in history were standing quietly in the room, listening, thinking and solving problems while everyone else admired their dresses?
Probably far more than we will ever know.
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