Hedy Lamarr A Hollywood starlet from the 1930
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Posted On: 05/27/2021 9:42:12 AM
Hedy Lamarr
A Hollywood starlet from the 1930s until the 1950s, Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in Europe” – but her looks and acting skills were far from the defining aspects of her life.
When not acting, the Austrian immigrant dabbled in tech. During the early stages of WWII, Lamarr and composer George Antheil created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed,” Lamarr’s biographer, Richard Rhodes, wrote. “But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is.”
Lamarr and Antheil successfully developed a means to prevent the jamming of torpedoes’ frequency hopping – along with spread spectrum technology. The invention — which would lead to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and guided missile systems — was patented in 1941, but the Navy did not put their invention to use until the 1960s during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hedy Lamarr was honored in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, a BULBIE (basically the Oscars of inventing) and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014
A Hollywood starlet from the 1930s until the 1950s, Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in Europe” – but her looks and acting skills were far from the defining aspects of her life.
When not acting, the Austrian immigrant dabbled in tech. During the early stages of WWII, Lamarr and composer George Antheil created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed,” Lamarr’s biographer, Richard Rhodes, wrote. “But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is.”
Lamarr and Antheil successfully developed a means to prevent the jamming of torpedoes’ frequency hopping – along with spread spectrum technology. The invention — which would lead to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and guided missile systems — was patented in 1941, but the Navy did not put their invention to use until the 1960s during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hedy Lamarr was honored in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, a BULBIE (basically the Oscars of inventing) and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014
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