Featured Woman in STEM: Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was an actress during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood who also made contributions to technology, patenting a radio signalling device during World War II.
Career and Accomplishments
Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria in 1914. Her film career took off in 1933 with her performances in Austrian, German, and Czech films, and in 1937, she signed a contract with MGM to begin her career in Hollywood. In 1945, Lamarr formed a production company, something frowned upon by Hollywood for actresses to do. Over her 28-year career, Lamarr was in over 30 films and produced 2.
Lamarr didn’t have much formal education, but as child, she and her father would take walks around Vienna, and he would explain how various machines and technologies worked. This got Lamarr interested in inventing as a hobby. In her spare time, she created an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that, when dropped in water, made a fizzy beverage.
Lamarr’s blueprint for her patent
At the height of her career, during World War II, Hedy Lamarr learned about radio-controlled torpedoes and how their signals could easily be jammed. Lamarr had an idea for a frequency-hopping machine that couldn’t be tracked. With the help of her friend, composer George Antheil, Lamarr created a player-piano-like mechanism that would jump around radio frequencies to prevent a third party from jamming the U.S.’s signals. In 1942, they patented their idea and donated it to the U.S. military to help defeat the Nazis.
When she gave her idea to the Navy, they said they had no use for it and dismissed her. After the war ended, though, Lamarr’s invention started to be used by the military to encode communication in all sorts of gadgets. Today, similar techniques that came from Lamarr’s idea are used in Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth technology.
Hedy Lamarr’s contributions to technology went unrecognized until 1997 when she and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Also in 1997, Lamarr was honored with the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, making her the first woman to receive the “Oscar of inventing.” In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
People often underestimated Hedy Lamarr because she was a woman who was known for her beauty—she even said on multiple occasions that her beauty was her curse. But despite the limitations she faced, Hedy Lamarr continued to explore her interests and passions and made vital contributions to science that we benefit from today.
In Her Own Words
Hedy Lamarr never spoke publicly about being an inventor, so when she died in 2000, her family thought her science story died with her. But in 2016, director Alexandra Dean and producer Adam Haggiag found never-before-heard tapes on which Lamarr talks about her whole life, giving the opportunity to tell her story from her point of view. From these tapes, Dean and Haggiag created a documentary called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, filling out the film with interviews from friends, family, and colleagues. The documentary debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and premiered on PBS’s American Masters series in May 2018. Below is a clip from the movie about Lamarr’s development of her frequency-hopping machine.
