The Beauty and Brains of Hedy Lamarr

To celebrate the Women's History Month, I'm gonna share to y'all one of the most important inventions in history by a famous Old Hollywood actress

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In the 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading ladies. But away from the cameras, her ion for innovation spawned the wireless communication technology we take for granted today.

Of all the many parts played by Hedy Lamarr during her glittering Hollywood career, none can be quite as inspirational as the one which most people know least about – her life away from the cameras.

For as much as she became known as ‘Hollywood’s most beautiful woman’, there was much more to Lamarr than just her stunning good looks. Put it this way: without her there might be no WiFi, no Bluetooth and even no smartphones.

One such idea would prove to be a game changer in of wireless communication: it would pave the way for the foundation for today’s mobile phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and of course GPS.

“Frequency hopping” was an ingenious way of switching between radio frequencies in order to avoid a signal being jammed. It was developed by Hedy Lamarr with the American composer George Antheil as a “secret communications system”. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code that could prevent secret messages from being intercepted.

After receiving a patent for it in 1942, Hedy Lamarr donated the technology to the US military to help fight the Nazis, specifically to help guide torpedoes under water without being detected. But it was dismissed at the time and the significance of the discovery would not be realized until decades later when it was used by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It would subsequently go on to be used in a wide range of military applications, but, significantly, it was the “spread spectrum” technology that Hedy Lamarr helped to invent that would form the basis of modern wireless communication technology and enable the smartphone boom and WiFi connections we take for granted today.

From: thalesgroup.com