LAMARR, HEDY (born Hedwig Eva Kiesler, 9 November 1914–19 January 2000), Austrian American actress and inventor, known for her many film roles during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and for a crucial but unheralded invention during World War II.
Lamarr was born in Vienna to Jewish parents, though her mother had coverted to Catholicism and raised Hedy as a Christian. As a preteen she won a beauty pageant and not long after began her acting career in Berlin in the early 1930s, first gaining widespread attention for her performance in the Czech film Ecstasy (1933), which featured a controversial nude scene as well as unmistakably sexual content. Lamarr moved to Hollywood in 1937, signing a contract with MGM, and starred in numerous films, such as Algiers (1938), Boom Town (1940), and Samson and Delilah (1949), nearly always being cast as a seductress and/or femme fatale.
In addition to her acting talents, Lamarr was also a self-taught inventor who would often pass the downtime on movie sets by honing her ideas. During World War II she was an active supporter of the US war effort and hit upon a novel way to contribute to it: because her first husband, an Austrian munitions dealer, often took her along to arms deals with the fascist German government back in her Berlin days, she learned that the Nazis were searching for a way to guide underwater torpedoes to their targets using radio frequencies, and also that such guidance could be disrupted or “jammed” by enemy radio. Lamarr the inventor was intrigued by the possibilities.
Later, at a Hollywood dinner, Lamarr discussed the technology with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, who was immersed in related experiments involving the musical possibilities of synchronized radio frequencies, and the two were soon collaborating on a groundbreaking communication system using “frequency hopping,” in which a piano roll switches rapidly between eighty-eight frequencies, making it difficult for the enemy to jam or intercept the signals. In 1941 they obtained a patent for the technique, known as the “Secret Communication System.” Though the Navy turned them down when offered the patented technology by the inventors, eventually the ideas embedded in the system would play a crucial role not only in the development of military-communication technology but also such twenty-first-century phenomena as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS.
Lamarr’s role as an inventor was largely overshadowed during her lifetime by her arresting beauty and acting fame; it was only in the 1990s that she began to receive recognition for her groundbreaking work in the field of communications. In 1997 she and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, and she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 for her pioneering work on frequency-hopping. That same year Lamarr made history as the first woman to be honored with the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, often dubbed the “Oscars of inventing”; henceforth she would be known as “the mother of Wi-Fi.”