The Many Lives of Hedy Lamarr

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Biographical Overview

Hedy Lamarr (1914--2000) was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo, society has long ignored her inventive genius. Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria on November 9th, 1914 into a well-to-do Jewish family. An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man, who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He would often take her for long walks where he would discuss the inner-workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars. These conversations guided Lamarr’s thinking and at only 5 years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age.  Lamarr’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt at age 16. She studied acting with Reinhardt in Berlin and was in her first small film role by 1930, in a German film called Geld auf der Straβe (“Money on the Street”). However, it wasn’t until 1932 that Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress for her role in the controversial film, Ecstasy. Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy. Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived. She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” She was incredibly unhappy, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took with her the knowledge gained from dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry. While in London, Lamarr’s luck took a turn when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, of the famed MGM Studios. With this meeting, she secured her ticket to Hollywood where she mystified American audiences with her grace, beauty, and accent. In Hollywood, Lamarr was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes. Lamarr dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.” Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II. In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the Axis Powers. The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds. Happy in her adopted country, she became an American citizen in April 1953. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s patent expired before she ever saw a penny from it. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

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Timeline Highlights

Ecstacy (1933)
Charles Boyer with Lamarr (1938)
  • Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who co-invented the technology for spread spectrum. A very famous actress of her time, she is credited to be one of the most beautiful women to have ever graced the silver screen. Fascinated by cinema from childhood, she decided early on to become an actress and began her acting career as a teenager after being discovered by a film producer. An Austrian by birth, she eventually moved to America after meeting MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. A very glamorous and talented lady, she soon established herself as one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. Because of her sex appeal she was invariably typecast as the glamorous seductress and appeared opposite the era's most popular leading men such as Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and James Stewart. But Hedy Lamarr was no dumb beauty—she was a highly intelligent and smart woman with a keen interest in scientific pursuits. Along with the composer George Antheil, she co-invented the technology for spread spectrum and frequency hopping communications but did not receive immediate recognition for this invention. The significance of the invention was realized decades later, and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

  • 9 November 1914 Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. She was the only child of Emil Kiesler, a successful bank director, and Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler, a pianist.
  • 1920s Interested in acting from a young age; discovered by the producer Max Reinhardt who brought her to Berlin. Received training in theater and returned to Vienna where she began to work in the film industry, starting out as a script girl before becoming an actress.
  • 1933 Appeared in Gustav Machatý's film, ‘Ecstasy’ in 1933 as a young married woman who becomes involved in a passionate extra-marital affair with a soldier. She stirred considerable controversy with this role and became notorious for appearing in the nude in some of the scenes.
  • 1933 Married Friedrich Mandl in August. Mandl was a wealthy Viennese arms merchant and munitions manufacturer. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
  • 1937 Escaped from her controlling, jealous husband disguised as a maid. Fled to London. There she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She adopted the screen name ‘Hedy Lamarr’ at his suggestion.
  • 1938 Appeared in her first Hollywood movie, ‘Algiers’ opposite Charles Boyer. The movie became a sensation as the American audiences were captivated by Lamarr’s stunning beauty and striking onscreen persona.
  • 1939--1941 Briefly married to screenwriter and producer, Gene Markey. She adopted a son, James, during this marriage.
  • 1940s Became one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood over the next few years and appeared alongside several of the leading men of that era. She acted in 18 films during the 1940s which include ‘Boom Town’ (1940) with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, ‘Tortilla Flat’ (1942), co-starring Tracy, and ‘Samson and Delilah’ (1949), opposite Victor Mature.
  • 1942 Her most memorable role was in the movie ‘White Cargo’ (1942), which was based on a Broadway hit play by Leon Gordon. The film, in which she plays a beautiful seductress, was one of her biggest commercial hits.
  • 1943--1947 Her third marriage to actor John Loder produced two biological children. Ended in divorce.
CHRISTMAS WITH DENISE AND ANTHONY
Composer and Inventor, GEORGE ANTHEIL
  • 1940s Hedy Lamarr also became involved in scientific research and in collaboration with George Antheil, an avant garde composer, she co-created a frequency-hopping system for which the duo also received a patent. Hedy Lamarr in collaboration with George Anthiel co-created a frequency-hopping system to help combat the Nazis in World War II. The duo’s invention, though not much recognized during their lifetimes, served as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM, and CDMA.
  • 1950s--1960s She married three more times but none of these marriages too lasted for long. Her last three husbands were Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), and Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965).
  • 1950s ff. In spite of being one of the most successful leading ladies in the 1940s, she could not find much success in the 1950s. She acted in only a few films and made one of her last appearances in ‘The Story of Mankind’ (1957). Throughout her acting career more emphasis had been laid on her glamorous looks rather than on her talent, and she had been typecast as a sexy seductress. As she began to age and her beauty started waning, her film career started declining.
  • In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
  • The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
  • A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
  • She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd in recognition of her contribution to the motion picture industry.
  • 1997 She, along with George Antheil, was honored with awards from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in recognition of their contribution to technology.
  • In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years.
  • 2000 Hedy Lamarr suffered from several heart diseases during her later years and died in Casselberry, Florida on 19 January 2000, at the age of 85.
  • Lamarr became estranged from her adopted son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
  • 2014 Hedy Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame.

A Deeper Look Into Hedy Lamarr’s Inventions

from: How Hedy Lamarr and Her Inventions Changed the World (c) Hannah L. Miller. Updated Aug 30, 2022 https://leaders.com/articles/leaders-stories/hedy-lamarr-inventions/Retrieved 12 January 2023
“Improving things comes naturally to me,” Hedy Lamarr said of herself. Inventing was her method of switching from entertainer to entertained. Her mind was full of infinite possibilities. There was always something to learn, redesign, make excellent, or advance forward. Redesigning Faster Airplanes During WWII On the eve of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, one of Lamarr’s boyfriends, aviation tycoon Howard Hughes, took note of her brilliance. His new partner’s creativity and intelligence astounded him, causing the businessman to introduce her to his aerodynamics team so she could help advance the planes. Whether working from her movie set trailer or at-home lab, Lamarr fought boredom by engineering the design of faster aircraft. After analyzing the shapes of the world’s quickest fish and birds, she created a more economical, speedier wing design for Hughes. Hedy Lamarr and WiFi You might be wondering who invented WiFi. While Lamarr wasn’t technically the WiFi inventor, she conceptualized the type of spread spectrum technology that makes it possible. In 1940, she met self-proclaimed “bad boy” composer George Antheil at a dinner party. The two bonded in conversation after discussing how disturbed Lamarr was over the tragic sinking of the SS City of Benares. Out of the 90 evacuees who were children heading to safety from Britain to Canada, 77 perished due to an enemy torpedo striking the ship.  Lamarr wouldn’t let this chance meeting go to waste—she wanted to help out and serve in the war efforts. She provided Antheil with her phone number by writing it on his windshield in red lipstick.  Shortly after that, the two worked together on a wireless communication system that prevented enemy forces from “jamming” or blocking the signal that guided the Allies’ torpedoes. She called the invention “frequency hopping” since the system caused radio waves from the transmitter and receiver to change to a new one simultaneously. Hopping from various frequencies made it impossible to find and redirect incoming signals so a torpedo would miss its target.  Sadly, the U.S. Navy dismissed Lamarr’s contribution, telling her she’d be more useful selling war bonds. Wanting to help in any way she could, she agreed, raising 25 million dollars.  Fortunately, her invention didn’t go to waste. It was one of the key communication systems used during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, we see ripples of frequency hopping in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Milstar, a network of military communication satellites, also uses the same technology.  Other Notable Inventions As Lamarr once said, “All creative people want to do the unexpected.” Her inventions speak to this statement. During her lifetime, she came up with ideas for a chair that revolved in and out of the shower, a better traffic light, a tablet that made drinks carbonated, and a fluorescent dog collar.  The Long Road to a Proper Legacy Even though she lived in an age where women had to choose to be beautiful or intelligent, she bravely chose both. Although she didn’t receive the recognition she deserved for her innovative mind while she was alive, her legacy has shifted in recent years. In 1997, she and her co-inventor of frequency hopping, Antheil, won the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In addition to this, the film Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017) drew attention to her significant contributions to modern technology. Since then, articles from Forbes, the Smithsonian, Biography, PBS, and The New York Times have all helped reshape what people choose to remember and honor about Lamarr. Defining the “Think Big Anyway” Mentality There’s a poem by Kent M. Keith that Lamarr loved reading to her children before bedtime called “The Paradoxical Commandments.” After learning about her life, it’s easy to see why Lamarr chose these words to instill into her kids.  The end of the poem reads: “The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds./ Think big anyway./ People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs./ Fight for a few underdogs anyway./ What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight./ Build anyway./ People really need help but may attack you if you do help them./ Help people anyway./ Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth./ Give the world the best you have anyway.” These words were her life philosophy. Even when the world was cruel to her, Lamarr focused on doing good. Her resilience and demand for change and innovation still inspire and motivate people across the globe, even years after her passing.
Lodi (grandaughter), Anthony Loder (son), Wendy (granddaughter), Denise (daughter)

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