Hedy Lamarr was the biggest film star of the 1940s. MGM called her the most beautiful woman in the world. What nobody knew was that between takes, she was quietly inventing the technology that would one day power WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. She never saw a cent of it.
Who She Was
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna on 9 November 1914 into a wealthy Jewish family. Her father was a bank director who loved walking her through the city explaining how things worked: printing presses, streetcars, machines of every kind. She absorbed it all and asked more questions than anyone had answers for.
She studied engineering as a teenager and showed a sharp aptitude for mechanical systems. She also fell into acting almost by accident, drawn to it through Viennese theatre circles. By her early twenties she was one of the most recognisable faces in European cinema.
In Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer of MGM signed her and gave her the name Hedy Lamarr. He also reportedly dismissed any conversation about her scientific interests as a distraction. He had not hired her to think. She thought anyway.
The First Marriage
Before Hollywood, there was Friedrich Mandl: an Austrian arms dealer, fascist sympathiser, and one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Lamarr married him at 18 and almost immediately understood what she had walked into.
Mandl was obsessive and controlling. He bought up every print of a film she had made as a teenager. He took her to business dinners with Nazi officials and Mussolini, where the men talked weapons: radio-guided torpedoes, anti-aircraft targeting systems, frequency jamming. The idea was that you could disrupt an enemy's guidance system by broadcasting noise on the same radio frequency.
She sat quietly and listened. She understood more than anyone in the room suspected.
In 1937 she escaped. The most widely told version has her disguising herself as a maid to slip past a guard, fleeing to Paris, then London, then a ship to New York. She arrived with very little. But she had spent four years absorbing the mechanics of modern weapons systems, and that knowledge came with her.
The Invention
By 1940 she was a star. She was also restless. She could not stop thinking about the war and about the obvious weakness in radio-guided torpedo systems: jam the frequency and the weapon goes blind.
At a Hollywood party she met George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer best known for a piece called Ballet Mecanique, which he had scored for sixteen synchronised player pianos. They started talking about the torpedo problem.
Lamarr proposed a solution: instead of broadcasting on a fixed frequency, what if the transmitter and receiver hopped between frequencies together, in a pre-agreed random pattern? The signal would appear as noise to anyone trying to intercept it. You could not jam a signal you could not lock onto.
The synchronisation problem, she thought, was similar to the challenge Antheil had already solved with his pianos. He agreed. He designed the mechanism. She supplied the core concept.
They filed Patent US 2,292,387, "Secret Communication System," in June 1941. It was granted on 11 August 1942, listed under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey. They donated the rights to the US government. The Navy examined the patent, filed it, and did nothing with it.
What Came Next
The patent expired in 1959, with no compensation to either inventor.
In the 1960s, military engineers began implementing spread-spectrum communication systems based on exactly the principles Lamarr and Antheil had described. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, US naval ships used spread-spectrum technology to communicate securely. By the 1980s it was the backbone of military communication. By the 1990s it was inside every cordless phone.
When engineers began tracing the lineage of wireless communication technology, they found Patent US 2,292,387. They found the name Hedy Kiesler Markey.
In 1997, at the age of 82, Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for her contribution to wireless communication. She reportedly said it was about time.
She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, fourteen years after her death.
Her Later Life
The latter decades were not easy. Lamarr married six times. In 1966 she was arrested for shoplifting at a department store in Florida and later acquitted. She became increasingly reclusive through the 1970s and 1980s, spoke mainly by telephone, and declined nearly all interviews.
She left one of the most famous lines in Hollywood history: any girl can be glamorous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
She said later in life that she was more proud of her patent than of anything she had done in front of a camera. Nobody had ever asked her about the patent until she was eighty.
She died on 19 January 2000 in Casselberry, Florida. She was 85. Her son Anthony Loder scattered her ashes in the Vienna Woods, as she had requested.
What She Left Behind
Today, frequency-hopping spread spectrum is the foundation of CDMA, the communication protocol behind mobile phones, as well as WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. Every wireless device made in the past thirty years contains technology derived from a concept Hedy Lamarr developed in 1940 between film shoots.
She holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She also holds US Patent 2,292,387. She never received a royalty from either one.
Not WiFi directly, but the foundational concept behind it. Her 1942 patent described frequency-hopping spread spectrum: a method of transmitting signals by rapidly switching between frequencies in a pattern known only to sender and receiver. That principle is the basis of CDMA, which powers mobile networks, and is closely related to the spread-spectrum techniques used in WiFi and Bluetooth. The direct lineage from her patent to your phone's wireless chip is not disputed by engineers.
The Navy acknowledged the concept but said the technology to implement it did not yet exist in a practical form. The miniaturisation of electronics required to switch frequencies fast enough was decades away. By the time the hardware caught up in the 1960s, her patent had already expired. She received nothing.
Accounts differ. The most repeated version says she drugged a maid, borrowed her uniform, and slipped past guards to reach Paris. Other accounts suggest she simply left during a social outing and did not return. What is consistent across all accounts is that she left with nothing but what she had learned and made it to London, then New York, entirely on her own.
Barely. The EFF Pioneer Award in 1997 was the first public recognition of her technical contribution, received when she was 82 and already reclusive. She did not attend the ceremony and accepted by telephone. She died in 2000. Posthumous honours followed: the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, a Google Doodle on what would have been her 100th birthday, and a 2017 documentary called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.
Sources
National Inventors Hall of Fame: https://www.invent.org/inductees/hedy-lamarr
Womens History: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/hedy-lamarr
Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shivaunefield/2018/02/28/hedy-lamarr-the-incredible-mind-behind-secure-wi-fi-gps-bluetooth/
IEEE: https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/hedy-lamarr/
