converstion

1. “Any girl can be glamorous.
All you have to do is stand
still and look stupid.”
—Hedy Lamarr
1. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress from
Austria. During MGM’s Golden Age (the 1940s),
Lamarr was named The Most Beautiful Woman
in the World. Few people knew that she was also
an inventor whose ideas paved the way for
wireless communication.
2. Hedy Lamarr’s real name was Hedwig Eva Maria
Kiesler. She was born to Jewish parents in Vienna
on November 9, 1914. Her mother called her an
“ugly weed,” but others recognized her for her
beauty. Hedy’s film career took off in 1933 in
Germany after she appeared nude in a Czech
film called Ecstasy.
3. At the age of 18, Hedy married Friedrich Mandl, a
wealthy Austrian arms dealer. At dinner parties,
she listened to conversations about weapons and
the war effort. She despised the Nazi supporters
who came to her home, and one evening while
everyone was asleep, she fled out a window and
escaped to Paris.
4. After her escape, Hedy met Louis B. Mayer, the
co-founder of MGM Studios. The film producer
offered her a job in Hollywood on one condition.
She had to promise to learn English. Throughout
the ‘40s, Hedy Lamarr (her new stage name)
starred alongside Hollywood’s leading men,
including Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey. Her face
was well known, but she had very few lines.
5. Screen life bored Lamarr, but she was fascinated
by science. In her spare time, she loved to invent
things. Her most serious idea was a radio guidance
system for US Navy torpedoes. Its purpose
was to vary the radio signals sent to a torpedo
to prevent the enemy from jamming it. Lamarr
introduced her “frequency hopping” idea to her
friend George Antheil, a pianist. Antheil used his
knowledge of self-playing pianos to help her build
the technology to make her idea work.
6. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for their
frequency hopping invention in 1942. The US Navy
did not take the invention seriously, however,
and the government encouraged Lamarr to use
her celebrity status, rather than her intellect, to
support the war effort. Lamarr agreed to set her
idea aside. She then raised millions of dollars for
the war effort by convincing crowds at rallies to
buy war bonds.
7. It wasn’t until 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
that frequency hopping technology was put to
use. It later became the basis of “spread spectrum
technology” in wireless communications. When the
frequency of a signal is varied, it creates greater
bandwidth. In 2014, fourteen years after her
death, Hedy Lamarr was finally recognized for her
breakthrough technology and inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Hedy Lamarr