Actress, Hollywood star but also inventor of wireless communication.
The unknown was always so attractive to me… and still is – she once confessed.
She was born on 9 November 1914 in Vienna. As the only daughter of a deputy bank director and a well-known pianist, she received a good education and could afford to develop her wide-ranging interests like ballet, acting, but also mathematics and physics at the age of 16, she entered drama school and almost immediately began receiving her first offers for film roles. After starring in a number of high-profile productions, causing an international scandal with her starring role in Ecstasy and a turbulent marriage, she tried to make a career for herself in the United States. During a trip overseas, she met Louis B. Mayer, the founder of the MGM studio, which helped her get her start in Hollywood.
Already as a movie star, she did not give up pursuing these passions, which, she admitted, unlike acting, were not boring and repetitive. She devoted many hours to laboratory work and scientific experiments, constantly expanding her knowledge of physics and chemistry.
In 1940, prompted by news of the tragic sinking by a German U-boat of a ship evacuating civilians, including children, Hedy Lamarr, together with George Antheil (an American composer and inventor), decided to develop a system for controlling a torpedo by radio waves. Hedy was already familiar with the principles of radio-controlled torpedoes. The tragedy of the sunken ship inspired her to refine this technology so that the transmission of the signal could not be blocked. Her project was to develop a mechanism in which radio
guidance transmitters and torpedo receivers could simultaneously switch to different frequencies. Lamarr and Antheil’s collaboration resulted in the development of a frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) system that allowed the previously developed assumptions to be put into practice. The invention was handed over to the navy, but its potential was not put into practice until many years later, when improved transistors made it possible. However, this does not affect the fact that the solution proposed by Hedy Lamarr became the prototype for GSM networks or today’s Wi-Fi, WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS networks.
