Hedy Lamarr Forgotten as Female Inventor Who Brought Us WiFi Connection

Photo by Roger W

If you can remember 1989 and When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan’s onscreen orgasm awakened such a force in America that our loins had us limping for a week. You remember, that would be from the pain endured by rolling in our seats with laughter. But if you want an onscreen orgasm with legs, Hedy Lamarr’s scandalous rendition in the Czech film Ecstasy (1933) brought her ridicule the world over and essentially boxed her into playing high-class whores for the rest of her career. But sadly, it didn’t do any justice in remembering her true brilliance as a World War II female inventor. For proof, all you have to do is reach down in your pocket, because the iPhone that resides there, and your Wifi connection, has her name and patent written all over it.

The story of this lifelong snubbed talent began in 1933 when Lamarr married her first husband - Austrian arms dealer Friedrich Mandl. Greedy, controlling, and jealous, Mandl’s half-Jewish origins gave him no qualms about entering partnerships with Nazi Germany, or throwing parties that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini attended. Thus Lamarr often found herself in discussions involving military technology with Mandl into the wee hours of the morning.

Among the discourse between the aggrieved spouses was the problem of signal jamming and the ease at which torpedoes could be knocked off course with intervening radio signals. But by being a virtual prisoner of Mandl, the fully Jewish Lamarr eventually put flight out of Europe ahead of bringing application to steering underwater projectiles.

Escape from Austria

Escaping to Paris in 1937 by dressing undercover as a maid, Lamarr booked passage on a boat to America that she knew Louis B. Mayer would be on; before reaching port, the mogul had signed Lamarr to a $600 a week salary. Due to typecasting from Ecstasy, Lamarr appeared at her sultriest in films like The Doubleheader (1940) with Clark Gable, Boom Town and Comrade X, as well as Ziegfeld Girl (1941), White Cargo (1942), and Dishonored Lady (1947).

For Lamarr, this newfound freedom had Hollywood trapping her in another form of captivity. “People gawk at me like I was like something in a zoo,” she told Life Magazine in 1938.

Navy sees just another Pretty Face until Cuban Missile Crisis

But it did not deter the female inventor from playing a part in the war effort, which fed into a secret creativity to be an inventor. Lamarr had partitioned off a room in her house exclusively for this engineering hobby. So when she met music composer George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner party in 1940, a signal jamming solution jumped out at her. He had invented an avant-garde symphony system where a dozen player pianos could operate in synchronization, and she rolled the idea into torpedo play.

In other words, if pianos could be synchronized to hop from one note to another by using a piano roll, why couldn't radio signals? By submerging the science under water, Lamarr proposed that a transmitter and receiver could simultaneously jump from frequency to frequency, and an enemy would not know where the signal was coming from. In other words, it couldn’t be jammed. With her patent for this “Secret Communication System,” Lamarr and Antheil had laid the groundwork for what would become known as the frequency hopping spread spectrum.

Experts at the time acknowledged the possibilities, but the U.S. Navy might have just seen a pretty face. Likening her inspiration to putting a piano player on a torpedo, the Navy’s top brass simply filed it away and told Lamarr she’d be better served selling war bonds.

She acquiesced and the USO had another booking. Yet, the military would come to recognize the importance of her patent during the Cold War, and others eventually built on the idea. In fact, after the U.S. Navy sat on the patent for over two decades, which Lamarr signed away to the military brass in 1942, they finally began implementation. The Cuban Missile Crisis provided its coming out party when Lamarr’s technology was used to code military messages between ships and the U.S. government.

Don’t Leave Home without It

Now, the principles of Lamarr's technology are attached to the devices that follow our every move today. Unlike landlines, which have precisely one connection, cell phones share a wide bandwidth carrier channel. So to prevent interference among multiple users, and to transmit the right message, a unique code for each must be deciphered and switched thousands of times along this channel.

This once-neglected patent is a cornerstone of today’s spread-spectrum communication, including GPS, Bluetooth, and all Wi-Fi connections.

So every time your smartphone makes a frequency jump, you should say thank you to Hedy Lamarr, who never made a cent off her innovation. Just as bad, the Navy never even truly acknowledged the importance she played in the patent she gave to them.

Recognition, though, did come in a long-belated acknowledgment by the scientific community and even a few awards. But the beauty she had run away from her whole life passed her by and several botched plastic surgeries made her a recluse who never accepted the awards. And despite being married six times in her life, she ultimately died alone in 2000 at the age of 85.

But the final indignity Lamarr endured might be what she’s most known for today by those who still think Meg Ryan faked the first onscreen orgasm.

From Blazing Saddles:

Governor William J. Le Petomane: Thank you, Hedy, thank you.

Hedley Lamarr: It's not Hedy, it's Hedley. Hedley Lamarr.

Governor Le Petomane: What the Hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You'll be able to sue her!

She did just that, and Mel Brooks settled out of court. Ironically, the Navy got off free. Unfortunately, she’s remembered for the same thing and that’s a call we all need to drop.