American History, Unfiltered: Hedy Lamarr

 

American History, Unfiltered: A post series highlighting people from traditionally marginalized groups who accomplished great things for America.

Are you using WiFi right now? Let’s talk about who created the basis for this technology. 

During the 1940’s, the hot, “go to”, actress of the time was a beautiful woman named Hedy Lamarr. She felt her beauty was often her curse, despite being what drove her career in Hollywood. But for most of her life, people only saw her as a pretty face, when in reality she was a genius with a passion for science, innovation, and invention. She was quoted saying “Inventions are easy for me to do. I don’t have to work on ideas, they come naturally.” She would spend hours in her trailer on movie sets, testing theories and experimenting with technology.

When she heard about the Navy having trouble with radio-controlled torpedoes, she recruited composer George Antheil and together they headed down the path of inventing “frequency hopping”. This was a way of switching between radio frequencies in order to avoid a signal being jammed. The invention formed an unbreakable code that could prevent secret messages from being intercepted. Without this invention we would not have WiFi today. 

In 1942 after the patent was received, Hedy donated the technology to the US Military to help fight the Nazis. But it was dismissed at the time and the significance of the discovery would not be realized until decades later when it was used by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

She was unappreciated as an inventor in her time, the details of her inventions not coming out until her obituary was published. Hedy LaMarr never received any money for her invention.