The glamor of old Hollywood is a familiar image to most of us. We can conjure pictures dazzling starlets and debonaire actors at the drop of a hat, and we’d be lying if we said we weren’t seduced by the smoky scenes of Fred Astair, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Kelly, and Rita Hayworth. When people think of the actors and actresses who graced the silver screen in the mid-twentieth century, they think of them simply as that—actors. Little attention is paid to the people they were beyond their profession; few know what lie behind those beautiful faces, no matter how brilliant they may be. One such figure is Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr, who possessed just as much intelligence as she did beauty and talent.

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to parents Emil and Gertrud Kiesler on November 9th, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. Although Lamarr’s parents were both Jewish, her mother raised her as a Catholic but she was never baptized. She was an only child, which when coupled with the family’s financial comfort, ensured that Lamarr was doted upon — especially by her father. Both parents were involved in raising Lamarr and wanted to instill curiosity and creativity in her. Her father, a successful bank manager, had an interest in science and machinery. He would often talk with Lamarr about technologies such as street cars and the printing press, inspiring her fascination with the way things worked. Lamarr’s mother was a concert pianist and enrolled her daughter in ballet and piano lessons at a very early age, where they discovered her natural gift for performance. As a young child, Lamarr would take apart her music box to understand its inner workings. When she was done, she would attempt to put it back together until she did successfully.

But outside of the home, Lamarr’s brains were ignored for her beauty. When she was 12, she won a small beauty contest in Vienna, and at age 16, she was discovered by German producer Max Reinhardt while working as a script girl and performing as an extra in Money on the Street (1930). He cast her in a play he was putting up in Vienna called The Weaker Sex. Reinhardt was so taken with her talent and beauty that he brought her to Berlin with him to study acting, where Lamarr garnered the attention of other producers. In 1932, she gained recognition for her role in the controversial film Ecstasy, and this is when Lamarr’s acting career really began to take off.

In 1937, Lamarr divorced her husband Fritz Mandl, who worked in arms production and was a fervent fascist. He was unsupportive of both her acting career and her scientific interests. Thus, when she left him, she wanted to start anew and did so in London. It was in London that Lamarr met Louis B. Mayer, of MGM Studios, and from there she went to Los Angeles, California. Mayer introduced Lamarr to Howard Hughes, whom she dated and would later be friends with but never married. Hughes was very supportive of Lamarr’s intellectual pursuits and encouraged her scientific mind. Around this time, she began working on her own projects in her home, with Hughes, and even in her trailer on set in between scenes. Hughes introduced Lamarr to scientists and engineers at his airplane factories, allowing her access to what went on behind-the-scenes. With the encouragement of people in her life, along with the time and money to experiment, Lamarr began to innovate. She created an upgraded version of a stoplight, a tablet that could be dissolved in water to create a Coca-Cola-like drink, and a design for a faster airplane inspired by the anatomy of birds and fish, which left Hughes in awe of her genius when she showed him.

Everything changed in 1940 when Lamarr attended a dinner party. There, she met George Antheil, an eccentric composer and inventor whose modern music explored the emerging sounds of the first half of the twentieth century. The two discussed their concern for the impending war—Lamarr expressed her guilt over making money in Hollywood while trouble was brewing back home—and what they could possibly do to aid the Allied powers. The two worked tirelessly, putting their brilliant minds together. Lamarr not only brought her understanding of science and engineering, but knowledge she gained of munitions during her first marriage.

George Antheil and Hedy LaMarr’s original design, which is in the collections at the National Air and Space Museum

Together, Lamarr and Antheil invented a new communication system that was meant to guide torpedoes to their targets using frequency hopping technology. Essentially (and please bear with my explanation—I’m a history major) this system sends a signal that hops across frequencies on radio waves, both with the transmitter and the receiver, and this prevents the interception of the signal across radio waves by the enemy, allowing the torpedo to reach its target. Lamarr and Antheil were able to patent their technology under U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942. Unfortunately, the Navy did not end up using Lamarr and Antheil’s technology because it was “too cumbersome,” but in the mid-1950s, the Navy shared their concept with a contractor tasked with creating a “sonobuoy” to detect submarines. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, all US ships that formed the blockade around Cuba were armed with torpedoes that were guided by a ‘frequency hopping’ system. Frequency hopping alone, as an idea, is said to be worth at least $30 billion, but the patent expired without Lamarr seeing a cent. After the rejection from the US Navy, Lamarr focused on supporting the war effort using her celebrity status to her advantage; she traveled around the US selling war bonds and was able to sell millions of dollars’ worth of them.

Lamarr wasn’t recognized for her invention until 1997, when she and Antheil were jointly awarded the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lamarr was also the first woman to win the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014 for the development of frequency hopping technology. Lamarr and Antheil’s invention made it possible for scientists and engineers to later develop technologies we use every single day—Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, cordless phones, and cell phones. Any tech that uses “spread spectrum technology” (a broad terms for wireless communication that uses variable signals by hopping from one frequency to another if the signal fails) has its roots in Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency hopping technology. It’s the reason more users are able to communicate simultaneously with little interference.

Hedy Lamarr wearing her iconic costume from Ziegfeld Girl (1941) — Hedy Lamarr wearing her iconic costume from *Ziegfeld Girl* (1941)

Hedy Lamarr was a complex and multifaceted woman. Her brilliance brought us Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Her beauty and charm brought us dozens of classic films like Samson and Delilah and were the inspiration for two iconic characters, Snow White and Catwoman. Lamarr has no idea how important her invention would become, especially during the pandemic. Millions of people all over the world are using Zoom and other video chat applications to communicate with friends and family, attend college classes, take cooking lessons or work out classes, have important work meeting, and are even using it to celebrate major life events, like weddings or meeting someone’s baby for the first time. Next time you’re enjoying a virtual happy hour, chatting with family, or even working from home: remember that you have Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish-Austrian actress who wanted to help take down the Nazis, to thank.

Genius on the Silver Screen: How Hedy Lamarr Gave Us Wi-Fi

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