On This Day in History: August 11

Hedy Lamarr invents stuff

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I’m not Austrian so I didn’t realize that Hedwig is something people would name a baby girl. I mean, a Harry Potter owl? Sure. But your daughter? Anyway, her last name was Kiesler, and she changed both first and last to become Hedy Lamarr: talented actress and brilliant inventor who helped develop a radio technology to guide Allied torpedoes to hit their targets.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 11, 1942--

Born and raised Jewish in Austria, she left a possessive husband in 1937 for Hollywood, and helped her mother escape to the U.S. the following year when the fucking Nazis annexed her homeland. Lamarr had been trained and worked as an actress in Europe, and soon found fame in America with MGM Studios head Louis Mayer promoting her as the “world’s most beautiful woman.”

She quickly became a big star, but fame wasn’t something she embraced. It was reported that when asked for an autograph, she couldn’t understand why someone would want it. To Hedy, her most interesting work was as an inventor. Despite no formal training, she’d inherited a love of understanding technology from her father. While she dated business magnate Howard Hughes, he encouraged her “tinkering” and made his scientists and engineers available to make anything she asked.

During the war, she learned of an emerging technology that would allow for radio-controlled torpedoes that would help them hit their targets. But such technology was easy to jam by defenders. So Lamarr got to work with her friend George Antheil, a composer and pianist, to help develop a solution.

Together, they used a miniature player piano to synchronize radio signals to create FHSS, frequency-hopping spread spectrum: a manner of sending radio signals that quickly changed the frequency across a wide spectrum. The changes are known by a code in both the transmitter and the receiver, but not to eavesdroppers. The rapid hopping of frequencies prevented interference and interception. On August 11, 1942, the pair received a patent for their device.

At the time, it was difficult to implement, and the Navy wasn’t keen on integrating technology that didn’t come from inside the military. But a form of the technology was in use by the American Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Today, a variety of spread-spectrum technologies are used in Bluetooth.

Hedy and George were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

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