Hedy Lamarr

This 2014 celebration of inventor/actress Hedy Lamarr fell through the cracks when there was a change of editors at the Southern Illinoisan, so it appears here for the first time in print.

 November 9 marks the one hundredth birthday of Hedy Lamarr, a 1940s Hollywood movie star christened by MGM’s publicity department “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But while most of Lamarr’s films have largely been forgotten, it was what she did in her spare time that changed the world.

Born Hedwig Kiesler (Lamarr was a name given her by Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer) in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, in 1914, Lamarr first became famous at the age of 18 with the release of the Czech film Ecstasy. The movie scandalized proper European society with its story-line of a young woman actively pursuing an affair, only to cast her lover aside after a one-night stand, as well as a scene in which Lamarr appears nude and another in which her face is shown in close-up as she simulates orgasm.

In 1933, she married the wealthy Austrian munitions maker, Fritz Mandl, whose clients included top German and Italian political and military figures. Lamarr was expected to serve as window dressing when Mandl entertained his important guests as Hitler’s and Mussolini’s governments prepared for war, but she listened to the discussions and learned a great deal.

Lamarr left Mandl in 1937 and ended up in Hollywood, where she signed with MGM, which featured her in such movies as Algiers, White Cargo, and Samson and Delilah. Her co-stars included such leading men as Charles Boyer, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, James Stewart, William Powell, Victor Mature and Bob Hope. But Lamarr always chafed at her glamorous image. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once observed. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Lamarr though was anything but stupid. And because she was not attracted to the Hollywood nightlife, she typically spent her evenings at home engaging in her favorite pastime—inventing. Over the course of her life, Lamarr invented a dizzying array of items, including a bouillon cube that, when dropped in water, would create a carbonated, soda-like drink. As historian Richard Rhodes writes in his 2011 book Hedy’s Folly, “Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and to bring order to a world she thought chaotic.”

In Hollywood, she met George Antheil, a former avant garde composer who was now writing movie soundtracks. Antheil’s most famous work, “Ballet Mecanique,” was written to be performed by, among other instrumentation, sixteen synchronized player pianos. Like Lamarr, Antheil was a fellow amateur inventor.

With the outbreak of World War II, the two sought to help the Allied war effort. Drawing on a range of influences from the conversations Lamarr overheard at Mandl’s house to Antheil’s experience trying to synchronize player pianos, the two invented a radio guidance system for torpedoes that could not be jammed, a system Lamarr termed “frequency-hopping” and would later be called “spread spectrum.” As Rhodes explains, “With a signal hopping all over the radio spectrum, and doing so not regularly but arbitrarily, more or less at random, the transmission would be impossible to jam because an enemy would be unable to follow it.”

The invention was patented, but the Navy showed little interest in developing it and with that, the idea languished for decades, the patent expiring in 1959, the same year Antheil died. The military found some uses for spread spectrum technology, but it was not until the cell phone revolution of the 1980s that the idea was put to use on a large scale.

Spread spectrum solved a major problem arising with the widespread use of cell phones—that is, according to Rhodes, “allowing many different phones to talk at once by arranging for them to hop in many different sequences, thus staying out of each other’s way.” Thus it made possible the technology revolution of Wi-Fi, Global Positioning System (GPS), wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, digital watermarking and much more.

Lamarr received no money and, for a long time, little credit for her role in this technological revolution, as her contribution largely went unnoticed or was dismissed. Gradually though, in the decade before her death in 2000, the significance of her invention was recognized. In 1997, she and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s prestigious Pioneer Award.

So the next time you send a text or check your GPS to make sure you aren't lost, take a minute to think of Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous Hollywood star who definitely was more than just a pretty face.