Biography

Childhood

Hedy Lamarr was born on November 9th, 1914 in Vienna. Her father was a bank manager, and her mother was a pianist. She spent all her childhood in Döbling, and when she was only ten she already knew four languages, she could play the piano and was very interested in acting

Cinema

In 1931 she decided to change her lifestyle to devote herself entirely to an acting career. She began acting in Berlin and in 1932 she was chosen as the protagonist of the film "Ecstasy". In 1937 she met Louis B. Mayer, one of the founders of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film production company, and she became the new Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr. The stage name is a tribute to Barbara La Marr, a great silent film actress.

Invention

During the Second World War, when she discovered that the Germans were able to deflect American torpedoes by causing interference in radio signals, she came up with the idea of ​​creating a system capable of modifying the transmission of frequencies to make the torpedoes untraceable by the enemies. Hedy Lamarr develops a sophisticated cryptographic equipment with George Antheil. The first prototype, called the Secret Communication System, is based on perforated rollers that produce a rapid variation at regular intervals of 88 radio frequencies. The continuous change of frequency makes it impossible to intercept the communications between who transmit the signal and those who receive it, the only ones who know the sequence and can control the trajectory of the torpedo. The work of Lamarr and Antheil is the basis of the transmission technique known as Frequency-hopping spread spectrum, still used in mobile telephony, for the transmission of Bluetooth data and in wireless networks. The project was patented in 1942, after being presented to the National Inventors Council in Washington, but at first the navy judged the system impossible to apply to a torpedo because the equipment would have been too bulky.

Awards

In the 1990s, the technologies invented by Hedy Lamarr spread around the world. Hedy Lamarr returns to the limelight as a brilliant inventor. In 1997 she received the prestigious Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for her contribution to advances in telecommunications and information technology. After her death in 2000, she is inducted along with George Antheil into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. On November 9, 2015, on the occasion of the one hundred and first anniversary of her birth, Google paid tribute to her with an animated doodle that summarizes the most important moments of her extraordinary career.