Hedy Lamarr

Her Life

Hedy Lamarr 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.

An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director, 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 machines, like the printing press or street cars. Meanwhile, Lamarr's mother 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 and became an actress. Howard Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr. He took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process.

Lamarr 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. 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.

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.