Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian and American actress and inventor. During the 1940s, she achieved the peak of her Hollywood fame as a glamour icon while simultaneously co-inventing pioneering technology that laid the groundwork for modern wireless communications like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Managed by MGM and heavily promoted as the “World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” she lived a remarkable double life as a box-office star by day and an avid inventor by night.
Lamarr starred in a string of major commercial hits throughout the decade, including Boom Town (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), and White Cargo (1942). She capped off the decade starring as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s lavish biblical epic Samson and Delilah (1949). The film became a massive commercial phenomenon and the highest-grossing movie of 1950. Despite her intelligence, Hollywood studio executives heavily pigeonholed her into exotic, seductive roles, prioritizing her physical aesthetic over her technical acumen.
Disturbed by the ongoing threat of German submarines during World War II, Lamarr sought to aid the Allied forces by developing an un-jammable radio guidance system for torpedoes. Alongside avant-garde composer George Antheil, she co-invented a “Secret Communication System” in 1941. Inspired by synchronized player piano rolls, the mechanism rapidly switched radio signals across 88 different frequencies so enemy forces could not intercept them.
The duo was granted U.S. Patent 2,292,387 in August 1942. However, the U.S. Navy dismissed the invention at the time, shelving the paperwork and advising Lamarr that she could better serve the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds—which she did, raising millions of dollars. Though her patent expired before she could profit from it, the U.S. military eventually adopted the principles of spread-spectrum technology during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Decades later, her self-taught genius was fully realized, securing her a posthumous induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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