Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood Actress who Pioneered WiFi and Bluetooth

VIVA – Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress, but away from the cameras, her passion for innovation spawned wireless communication technology. She was an inventor who pioneered WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth. She has the real name; Hedwig Eva Kiesler and was born in Austria on November 9, 1914, into a well-to-do Jewish family.

As an only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man, who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. Her father would often discuss the inner workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars.

These conversations guided Lamarr’s thinking and at only five years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age.

Unfortunately, Lamarr’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt at age 16.

She studied acting with Reinhardt in Berlin and was in her first small film role by 1930, in a German film called Geld auf der Stra?e (“Money on the Street”). However, it wasn’t until 1932 that Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress for her role in the controversial film, Ecstasy, as quoted from the Women History site.

Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy. Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived.

She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.  I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded and imprisoned having no mind, no life of its own.”

She was unhappy, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took with her the knowledge gained from the dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry.

The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used to guide torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together.

Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention.

While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds. Happy in her adopted country, she became an American citizen in April 1953.

Meanwhile, Lamarr’s patent expired before she ever saw a penny from it. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997.

Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award.

Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency-hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.