For her scientific breakthroughs, she is honored today by an elaborate Google Doodle displaying a long, dynamic life on the day she would have turned 101.
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Here’s remembering Hedy Lamarr – an actress and inventor par excellence! The patent would be the basis for future technologies that make today’s world work, but she never made money from it, CBS News reports.
Dubbed the “most handsome woman in the world”, she seduced the world performing alongside Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart.
So during World War II, Lamarr drew upon her interest in science and military technology – gained in part through her first marriage to an arms dealer – to help devise a system to prevent the Nazis from blocking signals from radio-controlled Allied torpedoes. She also came up with “bouillon” cubes to turn water into a Coke-like drink, and a “skin-tautening technique based on the principles of the accordion”.
Lamarr soon became bored by her Hollywood acting career and tried her hand at inventing. She was married 6 times and had 3 children.
– Lamarr got very little recognition of her innovative talent at the time but in 1997, she and George Anthiel were honoured with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award. Not a very good billing then, but I shared equal billing with her in our film My Favorite Spy in 1951. Mayer, having heard of her reputation after Ecstasy, advised her to change her name from Hedwig Kiesler to Hedy Lamarr and to act in “wholesome family movies”, which she promptly agreed to.
“The only thing that saved her, not long before her death, was that a major computer company used her image in its packaging without permission, thinking she was dead”, said her son Anthony. The frequency-hopping idea that Lamarr and Antheil invented would eventually lead to spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Global Positioning System, Bluetooth, COFDM (used in Wi-Fi) and CDMA (used in wireless cellphones), according to a Harvard University article about the technology.
She passed away in Florida in January 2000 at the age of 85 due to heart failure.
Despite having both fame and fortune, she could not find inner satisfaction in life and summed up her tragic fall, “After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty”.
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Lamarr with her two children. “But she was constantly looking at the world and thinking, ‘Well, how could that be fixed?”
