Today, MCI wants to celebrate a true renaissance woman, Hedy Lamarr. Now only was she said to be ‘the most beautiful woman in film’, but also was a scientific genius whose invention gave us the foundations for modern tech.
Hedy Lamarr started life as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She starred briefly in Czechoslovakian films and was married to an Austrian munitions manufacturer. She ran away from her husband in the years prior to World War II and ended up in London where she met Louis B Mayer. It was from this fateful meeting that Hedy Lamarr launched her Hollywood career. She had the leading role in many Hollywood films, her most notable being ‘Samson and Delilah’.
We want to talk about her inventions most though. During the war, she and composer George Antheil worked on a frequency hopping system that would prevent radio controlled torpedoes from having their guidance signals from being jammed. The patent for this system was patented on 11 August 1942. She patented the system under her married name as she thought she wouldn’t be taken seriously if she registered it under Hedy Lamarr. Many articles have stated that this invention was used to develop Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS, but it has never been formally recognised.
Hedy Lamarr was, unfortunately, massively misunderstood. The times that she was living in didn’t appreciate that a woman could be both immensely beautiful and a genius at the same time. Finally, her genius was appreciated when she met fellow inventor, entrepreneur and businessman that was one of the wealthiest and influential people in the USA at the time. He built her a mobile laboratory and gave her access to his scientific teams. When Lamarr suggest to Hughes that his planes shouldn’t have square wings, but rounded wings in order to make them faster, he famously declared her a genius for her contribution.
