Hedy Lamarr: Actress, inventor who paved the way for Wi-Fi

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as the only child of Gertrud ‘Trude’ Kiesler, a pianist and Emil Kiesler, bank director.

As a child, Kiesler developed interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre as well as film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. Her father would often take her for long walks where he would discuss the inner workings of machines like the printing press or street cars.

Acting career

Discovered by an Austrian film director, the teenager drew international attention in 1933 with a role in the Czech film titled Ecstasy. After the end of an unhappy marriage with wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, who sold arms to the Nazis, she fled to the United States and signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood under the name Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film titled Algiers, Lamarr became a box-office sensation.

Over the next few years, she became one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood and appeared alongside several of the leading men of that era.

She acted in 18 films during the 1940s which include Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942), co-starring Tracy, and Samson and Delilah (1949), opposite Victor Mature.

Path-breaking innovator

During World War II, Lamarr learnt that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed.

She conceived an idea and contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her implement it. The duo developed a device for achieving that objective when he succeeded by synchronising a miniature player-piano mechanism with radio signals.

Their invention was granted a patent on August 11, 1942. Today, spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi.

Lamarr and Antheil’s contributions were formally recognised several decades later in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Personal life

Lamarr was married six times. She adopted a son, James, in 1939, after her second marriage to Gene Markey. She also had two biological children, Denise and Anthony, with her third husband, actor John Loder.

In the year 1953, she became a naturalised US citizen. In her later years, Lamarr led a reclusive life in Casselberry, a community just north of Orlando, Florida, where she died in 2000, aged 85.

Awards and honours

In 1939, Lamarr was voted as the “most promising new actress” of the year 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by a Philadelphia Record film critic. In 1951, British moviegoers voted Lamarr the tenth best actress of the year 1950 for her performance in Samson and Delilah.

Lamarr has a star in her name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Boulevard in recognition of all her contributions to the motion picture industry.

She, along with George Antheil, was honoured with awards from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 in recognition of their contribution to technology. Hedy Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014.

Source: Wikipedia, thefamouspeople.com, biography.com

INTERESTING FACTS

1. Although Hedy Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on several hobbies and inventions which included an improved traffic signal,

2. Lamarr advised aviation tycoon Howard Hughes to change the rather square design of his aeroplanes to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find.

3. Asteroid 32730 Lamarr, discovered by Karl Reinmuth at Heidelberg Observatory in 1951, was named in her honour. The naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center, in August 2019.

4. A dramatised version based on Lamarr’s life featured in a 2018 episode of the TV series Timeless. It centred on her efforts to help time travellers recover a stolen workprint of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane.

5. In 2011, the story of Lamarr’s frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores science.