Hollywood's celebrated beauty held the patent behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) was the Austrian-born Hollywood star who co-invented frequency hopping: US Patent 2,292,387, granted in August 1942 to her and the composer George Antheil, described a jam-proof radio guidance system for torpedoes — the spread-spectrum ancestor of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.
Between takes on MGM sets she worked at a drafting table, turning knowledge of munitions gathered from her first marriage — to an arms manufacturer who sold to the Nazis — into an invention the US Navy shelved, then quietly adopted decades later.
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in 1914 in Vienna to a well-off Jewish family. A film career began in Europe; in 1933 she married Fritz Mandl, an Austrian munitions magnate who dined with Mussolini and sold arms to Germany. At his table she absorbed how weapons — and their guidance — worked.
She fled the marriage in 1937, reached London, met MGM's Louis B. Mayer, and became Hedy Lamarr — 'the most beautiful woman in films'. Between shoots she tinkered: she even advised Howard Hughes on streamlining his aircraft.
Her idea: if a torpedo's radio transmitter and receiver hopped together, randomly, across 88 frequencies, no jammer could follow. The synchronization problem she solved with Antheil, an avant-garde composer who knew how player pianos keep perforated paper rolls in time — identical rolls in transmitter and receiver would hop in step.
They filed in 1941; the patent issued on August 11, 1942. The Navy, told to take a movie star's invention seriously, filed it away. Lamarr was instead asked to sell war bonds — raising a record $7 million in a single night.
The Navy did eventually use frequency hopping — for sonar buoys in the 1950s, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 — and the expired patent earned her nothing. Only in 1997, at 82, did the Electronic Frontier Foundation give her its Pioneer Award; she entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
One correction matters: she did not single-handedly 'invent Wi-Fi'. She co-pioneered frequency-hopping spread spectrum within a much larger history of wireless engineering. The real invention is documented, substantial — and needs no exaggeration.
