The Actress and the Torpedo

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. Her first husband was an Austrian arms dealer with ties to Mussolini and Hitler, whose dinner parties she attended while listening carefully to the weapons discussions. She fled him in 1937, escaped to London, and signed a contract with MGM. By 1940 she was the most famous actress in Hollywood, known as 'the most beautiful woman in film.' She was also, in her trailer during filming breaks and at home in the evenings, tinkering with inventions. In 1940, she met avant-garde composer George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner party. Together they developed a 'Secret Communication System' — a radio guidance method for torpedoes that used frequency-hopping spread spectrum to make the signal impossible to jam. They received US Patent No. 2,292,387 in 1942. The US Navy ignored it. The patent expired in 1959 without Lamarr receiving a penny. The technology was first deployed militarily during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It is now the foundational principle behind Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, aged 82. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.