photo by Clarence Sinclair (1940)
The 20th century saw the emergence of personalities whose impact transcends the boundaries of time and space. Among these figures is Hedy Lamarr, “the most beautiful woman in cinema”, whose life and achievements extend far beyond the realm of movie screens to touch the fields of technology and innovation. Her creative genius and ingenuity revolutionized the world of wireless communications, making her much more than just a cinema icon.
Youth
Hedy Lamarr was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, as Hedwig Kiesler. Her father, Emil Kiesler, was a bank director, and her mother, Gertrud Lichtwitz, was a talented pianist. She received an education that combined science and arts, learning several languages in a privileged environment, as well as dance and piano.
She became an actress at “the age of 16 to help her parents financially following the crisis of the 1930s. She eventually dropped out of” school to work in Germany alongside Max Reinhardt, a famous theater director. However, she continued her career in the United States from 1933 under the stage name Hedy Lamarr to evolve in the Hollywood film industry.
From Actress to Inventor
In the United States, she met pianist George Antheil, with whom she had passionate discussions about communication systems. Thanks to her memory of plans she had glimpsed from her former husband, Friederich Mandl, she managed to develop a radio frequency-guided missile system. The idea was primarily to put an end to the “torpedoing of passenger liners”.
The system, based on a transmitter-receiver system, allows radio-guided torpedoes to change transmission frequency, particularly to avoid detection by enemies. It simultaneously varies the frequencies of its transmitter and receiver according to the same recorded code. With her friend George Antheil, they called the invention a “secret communication system”.
by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil (1941) US Patent Office
As an anecdote, you can see on the patent application that her name is not written correctly: the U.S. Patent Office mixed up her stage name, Hedy Lamarr, and her real name, Hedwig Kiesler.
At the time, the Navy found the invention impossible to implement and therefore could not put it in place. It was not used for the first time until 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was only once it entered the public domain that the invention began to be used everywhere, in the 1980s.
Recognition
Hedy Lamarr had no echo of the use of her patent until 1973, during which she appeared in a press release for “National Inventors Day”. By then, she was already 59 years old and unsuccessfully tried to obtain financial compensation for her invention, despite having exceeded the legal 6 years to do so, according to U.S. legislation. This compensation was later estimated at 30 billion dollars.
Finally, it was not until 1997 that she was rewarded with the Electronic Frontier Foundation prize, at the age of 82, for her contribution to society.
She died three years later, on January 19, 2000, and posthumously received admission to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, after being nicknamed the “Smart Torpedo”.
Legacy
To this day, many technologies such as satellite positioning (GPS) or Wi-Fi still use this transmission principle. Hedy Lamarr is still recognized for her scientific contribution and continues to receive tributes, for example with the staging of theater plays. Her memory also lives on through various nods, such as the doodle set up by Google on her 101st birthday.
posted on November 09, 2015 (source)
Written by Lorena G. and edited by Tiffanie C.
