I have always been interested in people who show themselves not in one narrow field, but in many. And the greater the difference between those fields, the more interesting it is. One can remember, for example, Richard Feynman, the famous physicist who liked to play drums and draw. Or even Albert Einstein, who liked to play the violin. But right now I am not talking about them: I want to remember the actress, cinema pioneer, Hedy Lamarr.
In principle, the fact alone that she appeared in the first sex scene in cinema history (the film Ecstasy, 1933) is a very remarkable fact: a bold blow against the hypocritical moral customs of the era.
But much more interesting, in my view, is her contribution to technology. In 1942, Lamarr, together with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, received a patent for a “Secret Communication System” (US Patent 2,292,387). Their invention, the method of frequency hopping, allowed radio-controlled torpedoes to avoid interception and jamming: the signal constantly switched between frequencies according to a prearranged scheme.
The U.S. Navy rejected the invention, and Lamarr was told she would be “better off selling war bonds.” The technology was declassified only in the 1960s, and later it formed the basis of modern wireless standards, from GSM to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (posthumously for Antheil), and in 2014 Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the United States.
A Hollywood star and the inventor of a technology without which we could not talk on mobile phones: not a bad combination for one biography.