Hedy Lamarr: movie star and mother of WiFi?

‘Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’ In these two short statements, Hedy Lamarr perfectly articulated her feelings on the stereotypes and expectations placed on women like her in the 1930s. It’s true, she was a famously beautiful actress, who starred in more than 30 movies – she was Delilah in the incredibly successful Hollywood adaptation of Samson and Delilah (1949)

But of course, it’s not only acting that brings Hedy Lamarr to our attention as an important woman in tech this International Women’s Day – it’s her tale of courage, invention and escape, which forks along two paths: one toward arts and the other, science.

Indeed, it’s suggested that, during her often overlooked inventing career, she may even have created one of Wi-Fi’s key enabling technologies.

In summary, Hedy Lamarr’s life is a sometimes overlooked chapter in IT's diversity and inclusion story. Read on and you’ll understand even more about why we need more women in tech. The story also tells us more about how we can get more women in tech.

Humble beginnings and notoriety

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on 9 November 1914 in Vienna to a bank director father and pianist mother, young Hedy was drawn to the arts. She was fascinated by the stage and by age 12, she won her first beauty contest.

At 16, determined to follow her dream of acting, she forged a note from her mother to get a job at Sascha-Film (the largest film studio at the time in Austria) and landed her first small roles within that first year.

By 18, Lamarr had moved to Berlin and starred in the film that made her infamous, Exstase (Ecstasy). Ahead of its time for the portrayal of the nude female form, the film was banned in Germany, the USA – and by the Pope. She was already blazing a trail.

Daring escape

Enchanted by her on-screen presence, Austrian arms Merchant Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Mandl romantically pursued Lamarr. However, due to his links to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (and later even Adolf Hitler), Lamarr’s parents vehemently opposed the match, due to the family’s Jewish faith. Despite this, a headstrong Hedy agreed to marry Mandl in 1933.

Although being able to attend business meetings and conferences alongside her husband helped to stoke her interest and talent in applied sciences, Mandl became extremely controlling and wouldn’t allow her to act. Later, when interviewed about her marriage, she 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.’ 

As fascism was taking a stranglehold of Europe and her husband was helping in the efforts, Lamarr eventually had enough and plotted an elaborate escape to London in 1937. Depending on which account you read, Lamarr either drugged her maid and wore her clothes as a disguise or wore every piece of jewellery she owned to a party and then slipped away with her belongings before she could be noticed. 

Quite the exit.

Hitting the big time

After escaping Nazi Europe, things started looking up again for Lamarr when she arrived in London, as she was introduced to co-founder of MGM studios, Louis B Mayer. Turning down his original offer of $125 a week, Lamarr, who knew her worth, eventually managed to secure a $500 a week contract, changing her name to Hedy Lamarr to distance herself from her controversial movie and marriage. 

She would go on to move to America and star in countless box office hits until the late 1950s when she retired from acting.

The road less travelled

This brings us back to the crossroad in Lamarr’s story: born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on 9 November 1914 in Vienna to a bank director father and pianist mother, young Hedy was also drawn to the sciences.

She was taken on long walks by her father, where he would ‘discuss the inner-workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars,’ and encourage her to look at the world openly. By age five, Lamarr could be found ‘taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated’. And although it would be acting that Lamarr would eventually do for paid work, inventing would be her lifelong interest and the legacy for which she would be equally remembered.

Self reinvention

Sometimes, the idea that formal qualifications and training are needed before you can even begin a career in STEM can feel like a barrier, especially for women, but the career journey of Hedy Lamarr, who is known as much now for her invention as her acting, is a shining example of how to #BreakTheBias and forge your own path – at any age.

One of the most inspiring aspects about Hedy Lamarr’s story is that, while she is credited for several innovative ideas (including streamlining the design of aeroplane wings and frequency hopping signals – more on that later), she did not have any formal training, or background in tech, other than her own hobbies and interests. Instead, she had creativity, curiosity and the bravery, to pursue her passions and ideas until they became reality. And in some cases, this would take decades.

Act by day, invent by night

All throughout her acting career, Lamarr made the time to work on her inventions. ‘She set aside one room in her home, had a drafting table installed with the proper lighting and the proper tools – had a whole wall in the room of engineering reference books,’ writes Richard Rhodes, science writer and biographer of Lamarr. In here, she would create a concept for an improved traffic light system and a tablet that, when added to water, created a cola-like fizzy drink. Although neither idea made it to market, other companies later had success with similar designs, such as Fizzies.

Whilst acting, Lamarr met businessman and pilot, Howard Hughes, who encouraged her inventiveness. Hughes allegedly gave 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'. But it wasn’t until she paid a visit to one of Hughes’ aeroplane factories that she would truly demonstrate her genius.

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Lamarr was shown the planes and introduced to the engineers but left convinced that she could find a way to make them faster, helping Hughes to achieve his goal to sell them to the US military. Whilst researching books on the natural world, she found images of the quickest birds and fish and used what she learnt about their fins and wings to sketch streamlined designs for the planes. ‘Improving things comes naturally to me,’ she later said.

However, it would be her surprising work on signal technology for the military that would cement her place in the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame.

Did Hedy Lamarr invent Wi-Fi?

The short answer is no, Lamarr didn’t directly invent what now allows us to access the internet anywhere – but 80 years ago, she did devise a form of frequency hopping (FH) for secure communication to try and thwart the Nazis.

Having gleaned information about weaponry whilst married to Friedrich Mandl, Lamarr, who was herself Jewish, had an idea for a device that would allow torpedoes to find their target without having their signals jammed by enemy forces. She approached composer and fellow invention enthusiast, George Antheil, to help bring her idea to life.

With Lamarr's idea and Antheil’s musical know-how, a prototype, controlled by a piano player mechanism, which could switch between one of 88 different frequencies (there are 88 keys on a piano), was created; patent #2,292,387 for a ‘Secret Communication System’ was filed in 1942.

Antheil and Lamarr took the idea to the US navy, hoping to aid the allies in the fight against Nazi Germany – but, possibly due to miscommunication (reports suggest the navy thought they wanted to put a piano player inside a torpedo) the invention wasn’t picked up.

As Jacob Aron writes for New Scientist, ‘It is often said that this patent means Lamarr helped to invent Wi-Fi, but the story is more complicated than that. Lamarr and Antheil patented their invention in 1942, but it was classified until 1981, and during that time only used in military technology such as sonar or satellite communications.

Before the patent was declassified, other spread spectrum techniques were invented independently, including direct-sequence (DS) spread spectrum, which spreads a signal across a range of frequencies, rather than hopping between one at a time.

When Wi-Fi standards were first defined in 1997, they allowed for both FH and DS systems, but DS quickly became the dominant system and there are no FH Wi-Fi devices in use today.’ So, although it may be true that Lamarr’s concept did not directly evolve into today’s Wi-Fi, frequency hopping technology is still found in Bluetooth, GPS and secure satellite comms.

Legacy

After her death, Lamarr’s son, Anthony Loder, said that she would have been be glad about the legacy of her ‘frequency hopping’ concept: ‘She would love to be remembered as someone who contributed to the well-being of humankind.’ 

Whichever way we look at it, modern communications tech would not be the same without Lamarr’s bravery and bias-breaking innovation.