Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr: The Face That Hid a Patent

On 11 August 1942 the United States Patent Office issued number 2,292,387 for a "Secret Communication System." The inventors were a Hollywood composer and a woman recorded as Hedy Kiesler Markey. Moviegoers knew her by the name MGM had given her — Hedy Lamarr — and the studio was then selling her as the most beautiful woman in the world. The patent described a method for keeping a radio-guided torpedo from being jammed. The Navy did not want it.

A Viennese Girlhood, and a Scandal

Hedwig Kiesler was born in Vienna in 1914 — some accounts give 1913 — into a prosperous Jewish family. Her father directed the Bank of Vienna; her mother was a concert pianist. She was educated at Viennese schools and a Swiss finishing school, auditioned without success for the great impresario Max Reinhardt, and found her way into Austrian cinema in 1930.

Her breakthrough was not a performance but a scandal. The 1933 Czechoslovak film *Extase* put her on screen nude and in simulated intercourse. Austrian censors banned it. Pope Pius XI condemned it. At eighteen she was famous across Europe for the wrong reason, a pattern that would shadow her for sixty years: the world looked at her and stopped there.

The Arms Dealer's Wife

The notoriety brought her Fritz Mandl, an Austrian munitions dealer she married in December 1933. Mandl had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to trade with Nazi Germany; she converted that year as well. It was a controlling marriage, but it was also an education. Mandl entertained the men who bought and built weapons, and his young wife sat through their dinners absorbing the vocabulary of torpedoes, guidance and control.

In 1937 she got out. She drugged her maid, took her jewellery and ran — to Paris, to London, and finally onto a boat for New York. Louis B. Mayer signed her to MGM at $500 a week and renamed her after Barbara La Marr, a silent star already dead.

Hollywood Manufactures a Face

*Algiers* (1938), opposite Charles Boyer, made her. Two flops followed, then recovery with *Boom Town* and *Comrade X* in 1940. Through the war years she was a durable MGM property — *Ziegfeld Girl* (1941), *White Cargo* (1943) — before her greatest commercial success, Cecil B. DeMille's *Samson and Delilah*, in 1949. One critic wrote that her foreign voice, basilisk gaze and sinful body combined to magnificent effect. Lamarr's own assessment of the work was blunter: the job, she said, required only that she stand still and look stupid.

Eighty-Eight Frequencies

In 1940 the passenger ship *City of Benares* was sunk, killing children being evacuated from Britain. Lamarr wanted to be useful, and she had a specific idea of how.

A radio-guided torpedo transmits on one frequency, and a single frequency can be found and jammed. Her solution was to refuse to sit still: let transmitter and receiver change their tuning together, hopping in an apparently random pattern that an interceptor would hear only as noise. Synchronised, the two ends hear each other perfectly. She proposed eighty-eight frequencies — the number of keys on a piano.

That number was the bridge to her collaborator. George Antheil was an avant-garde composer who had synchronised player pianos for his *Ballet Mécanique*, and the problem of keeping two machines stepping in time to a punched roll was one he had already solved musically. He supplied the mechanism for her concept. They filed on 10 June 1941 and were granted the patent fourteen months later.

The Navy Says No

The Navy rejected it. What the government wanted from Lamarr was her face: she was sent out to sell war bonds and raised roughly $25 million, several hundred million in today's money.

Frequency hopping surfaced again long after the war — in sonobuoys, in torpedo control during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and eventually as part of the spread-spectrum grammar underlying GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. By then the patent had expired. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil earned anything from it.

The Long Decline

Her career thinned after 1945; by 1958 she was playing Joan of Arc in *The Story of Mankind*. She married six times — the producer Gene Markey, the actor John Loder, the bandleader Teddy Stauffer, the oil man Howard Lee, the lawyer Lewis Boles — and divorced every time. A 1967 autobiography, *Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman*, so appalled her that she sued its ghostwriters, calling it fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libellous and obscene. She was arrested for shoplifting at Macy's in 1966 and acquitted, and sued Mel Brooks over the villain "Hedley Lamarr" in *Blazing Saddles*. A woman who had once earned $7 million a year was, by the late 1960s, living on a pension of $48 a week. She spent her last years secluded in Orlando, Florida, reportedly unwilling to be seen after unsuccessful cosmetic surgery.

Recognition arrived at the very end. In 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her and Antheil its Pioneer Award. She died on 19 January 2000, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Why Hedy Is Called a Genius

The quality on display is analogical transfer: taking knowledge acquired in one world and applying it, uninvited, in another. Lamarr had no engineering training — Viennese schools, a Swiss finishing school, and a marriage in which she listened. From that she extracted a real insight, that the vulnerability of a radio link is its fixity, and that the cure is controlled unpredictability shared between two parties. She then recognised that a composer's player-piano rolls were the same synchronisation problem in a different costume. Antheil himself credited her with the original concept.

The honest counter-case is substantial. No one has documented a measured intellect; the institutions that honoured her praised an invention, not a mind. The device was never built for its purpose, never deployed, and was rejected by the service it was designed for. The patent lapsed unused, which means the line drawn from 1942 to Wi-Fi is a genealogy of an idea rather than a chain of development she drove — others arrived at spread spectrum independently and did the engineering that made it work. Antheil, not Lamarr, supplied the implementation. The popular title "mother of Wi-Fi" flattens all of this into something tidier and less true than what actually happened. What survives the deflation is still unusual: a self-taught outsider, given no reason to think about torpedoes, was right about something important two decades early.

Legacy

Lamarr spent her life being looked at and her afterlife being read. The patent that no one wanted has become the most durable thing about her — not because it built the modern radio spectrum, but because it proved that the person Hollywood had cast as decoration was, in the room where it counted, the one thinking. Her name now attaches to prizes and inventor awards for women in technology, an irony she would probably have enjoyed, having spent decades insisting there was something behind the face.

Achievements

• Co-patented a frequency-hopping 'Secret Communication System' (US Patent 2,292,387, 1942)
• Pioneered spread-spectrum techniques now foundational to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS
• EFF Pioneer Award (1997)
• Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2014)
• Starred in films including 'Algiers', 'Boom Town' and 'Samson and Delilah'