During the golden age of Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr was known as one of the most beautiful women in the world. Lamarr, however, wanted to be appreciated for her intelligence and invented a device that was crucial to the development of modern communications technology, write Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton.
‘Any girl can be glamorous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’
So said Hedy Lamarr, the 1940s Hollywood star and inventor described by Forbes magazine as the most glamorous geek of all time. Lamarr, a contract star with MGM at the height of Hollywood’s golden age, was certainly glamorous. Her intelligence, however, was never appreciated at the time, and her role in the development of modern communications technology is only now being recognised.
Apparently she has no time for anybody except something ultra-mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents.
Lamarr, originally Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, took an unlikely path to Hollywood. After starring in Czech director Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy aged 18, she married Austrian industrialist and arms dealer Friedrich Mandl in 1933. Despite being a Jew, Mandl was heavily involved in selling munitions to both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Though she otherwise found herself bored at Mandl’s lavish dinners with Germany military figures (up to and possibly including the Fuhrer himself), Lamarr listened intently to conversations about the technical aspects of weapon design.
‘Hedy was his trophy wife,’ says Robbins. ‘She was 19 and she was very famous and he wanted to basically own the most beautiful woman in Vienna as proof of what a successful man he was. I think that Hedy was kind of impressed by him in the beginning, but pretty soon she was very disappointed because he kept her a prisoner in her own home.’
Eventually Lamarr escaped (after drugging a maid and taking her uniform as a disguise, according to her autobiography) and made her way to America, making her Hollywood debut in Algiers in 1938.
Lamarr, however, was equally unhappy in Hollywood. ‘It was difficult for me to grow up with the person that I saw basically destroyed by an industry,’ says Lamarr’s son, Anthony Loder. ‘The wonderful, happy, carefree Viennese Hedy was morphed into the movie star that had to be perfect and look perfect constantly.’
The actress, who was hoping to enlarge her breasts, was introduced to avant garde composer and amateur endocrinologist George Antheil at a dinner party after the outbreak of war in 1939. Though their conversation about hormones failed to yield the desired result, a duet on the piano ended up producing an unlikely scientific breakthrough.
Antheil, who was famous for his work with pianolas or player pianos, kept changing key, forcing Lamarr to keep up. After they finished, Lamarr told him she had an idea that could be used to fight Nazi Germany: a piano roll-like system could change the radio frequencies used to control torpedoes in order to protect them from interference or jamming.
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‘Here then and at long last must suddenly come the true solution as to why Hedy does not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her,’ said Antheil, ‘why her drawing room sure enough is filled both with unreadable books and very usable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use, why apparently she has no time for anybody except something ultra-mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents. I believe it because I know.’
Lamarr and Antheil patented their frequency hopping device in 1942 and approached the US Navy with the idea. Navy bureaucrats fundamentally misunderstood the idea, however, and it was not until the 1950s that the idea was taken off the shelf. With the advent of miniature circuits and eventually microchips, the technology proved enormously useful.
‘As soon as they developed the technology, it spread through the Navy like wildfire,’ says Richard Rhodes, author of Hedy’s Folly. ‘This was just an absolutely wonderful system for protecting radio communications.’
‘By the time of the Cuban missile crisis all of the ships that were involved in quarantining Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis were equipped with frequency hopped radios. In the years that followed, the technology spread through all of the military services.’
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Eventually, frequency hopping would contribute to virtually every major communications technology, from GPS to Wi-Fi and the mobile phone network.
However, while her invention enjoyed success and helped to start the digital revolution, Lamarr herself was in a downward spiral. She became increasingly reclusive and was arrested for shoplifting in 1966, the year her autobiography was released.
‘I had made—and spent—some thirty million dollars. Yet earlier that day I had been unable to pay for a sandwich at Schwab's drug store,’ she wrote. She moved to Miami Beach and was involved in a series of lawsuits. In 1991 she was arrested again, this time for stealing $20 of laxatives and eye drops.
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Yet towards the end of her life (Lamarr died in 2000), she began to receive the recognition she deserved for her brains, not just her beauty. Anthony Loder accepted a Pioneer Award from the American Electronic Frontier Foundation on her behalf in 1997, and in 2014 was posthumously inducted into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.
‘Hedy realised that what she came up with was important but I don't think she knew how important it's going to be,’ says her son. ‘The definition of importance is the more people that it affects over the longer period of time. The longer this goes on and the more people it affects the more important she will be.’
‘She has her place in history now.’
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