Hedy Lamarr

Chelsea

When I was growing up, my Grandma Dorothy didn’t share my interest in peering into space and trying to understand the world above us. She always said there was so much to learn about here on Earth and inside us. Next to reading good history and fiction, she loved gardening, flowers, plants, trees—really anything that grew. She also loved movies from the 1930s and ’40s. Her favorite actresses were always those who were great at their craft and lived useful—or at least interesting—lives off-screen. When she told me about the many lives of Hedy Lamarr, our shared interests found a fascinating common ground. My grandma could never understand why more people didn’t know Hedy for more than her beauty or acting.

Hedy was born in Austria in 1914 into a well-off Jewish family. When she was little, her father would take her for long walks, pointing out the inner workings of streetcars and other machines around them. At five years old, she already loved to take apart her music box and put it back together, trying to understand how it worked.

Hedy was “discovered” at age sixteen and began acting in smaller European films. One of her early fans became her first husband, though the marriage didn’t last. He was in the arms industry and did business with the Mussolini government in Italy and had ties to the Nazis in Germany. She hated having to play the doting host to her husband’s business partners and eventually fled to London. There, she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios, gaining her entrée to Hollywood.

“Improving things comes naturally to me.”

—HEDY LAMARR

In the United States, she would work on her designs and inventions while in between movies and even in her trailer between takes. She pioneered new technology, inventing new wing designs for planes, creating a new kind of stoplight, and developing a tablet that dissolved in water, turning it fizzy. When my grandma and I were watching The Golden Girls, nature documentaries, 60 Minutes, or any of her favorite shows and saw an Alka-Seltzer commercial, she’d mention Hedy! (Even though Hedy didn’t invent the actual pill known as Alka-Seltzer; Maurice Treneer did in 1931.)

During World War II, Hedy didn’t want to just continue to make money in the movies (this was always what most impressed my grandma). She wanted to do something to help the war effort. She wanted to put to good use her own talents as well as the things she’d overheard in her home, absorbed at dinner parties with Nazis, and learned at scientific meetings she had attended in Austria. She hoped to join the National Inventors Council but was rejected and told to use her star power to sell war bonds. She did—but she didn’t stop there.

Hedy began working with George Antheil, a composer friend on a frequency-hopping system that could prevent military radio signals from being bugged or interrupted. She knew that would be important for general communications, and to ensure that the Germans and other Axis powers could not interfere with American and Allied radio-controlled torpedoes. When she first approached the U.S. Navy, they ignored her. Maybe it was because she was a woman, or because she was a beautiful woman (my grandma’s theory). Maybe it was the fact that she wasn’t yet a naturalized American citizen, or wasn’t in the navy. Or maybe it was because Hedy and George’s system was challenging to use consistently and effectively. While the patent on their invention expired before their invention was used, Hedy never lost faith in what she knew was groundbreaking technology.

It wasn’t until much later in her life that Hedy’s talent was recognized. Eventually, her work was used by the U.S. Navy, first in the early 1960s. She was finally honored in 1997 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. As for the frequency-hopping technology she developed, its impact is all around us today: Hedy and George’s invention paved the way for modern-day cell phones, Wi-Fi, and GPS.