“Any girl can be glamorous”, she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” The woman who delivered the words Hedy Lamarr was in her day frequently dubbed ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ But as a huge irony, because it was actually Hedy’s brain that made her stand out from the glamorous pack of 1940s screen goddesses.
For and be knows to many the screen siren is credited with inventing an early form of the spread spectrum, a key technology behind modern day wireless communication. Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in November 1913 in Vienna, Austria, she found worldwide notoriety when she appeared in the 1933 Czech film, the Ekstase which featured sins of her assuming the nude and in the thrills of sexual passion tame by today’s standards.
The film shocked MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, but he was still happy to catch her on a publicity. He swiftly signed her to a contract when she made to Hollywood. But first, she had to escaped from her Austrian husband Friedrich Mandl.
In 1937, she escaped from the coastal home allegedly by dragging the maid and borrowing her clothes. She made her American film debut in Algiers, romantic child’s boy idea about the the Casbah and plenty of Middle East in exoticism and glamour. The film was a hit as was Hedy so she was quickly cast in a succession with exotic plots such as The Beautiful Girl of Matrix and Lady of the Tropics for a suicidal spurn lover opposite Spencer Tracy in I take this woman.
In 1940 share the chunks to show off unsuspected comedy skills in the King Vidor’s satire about Russian propaganda, Comrade Ex, for the film was overshadowed by which was released the previous year and was hugely acclaimed as Greta Garbo’s first comedy. Hedy however, had other things on her mind.
In June 1941, she and her neighbor, the avant-garde composer George Antheil, formulated an idea of a secret communication system and in August of the following year, Hedy’s granted US patent 2292387. Hedy may have hated being married to munitions expert Fritz Mandl but she learned a lot from him, and her idea was to make it much more difficult to jam or detect radio control torpedoes and using frequency happing between 88 different frequencies. It was an extraordinary idea but one it was at least two decades from Hedy’s time. It wasn’t used by the American navy until technology caught up with Hedy’s vision 20 years later.
During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the science behind the idea is widely used today. It proposes the spread spectrum devices like mobile phone, wireless internet and defense satellite.
But throughout the 40s Hedy kept churning out to movies. In between films having divorced Mandl in 1937, she managed to marry a fortified times in her author biography Ekstase had made published in 1967 she was also rumored to have a 17 lovers of both genders although she accused of a ghost writers of taking huge liberties with her life story.
She had faded to Paramount with her final movie of the 40s. Settle be the male’s Samson and Delilah it was the highest grossing film in 1949 and the biggest hit of her career. She followed it with her 1950 melodrama, The Lady without the transport. With her looks fading and a partial for plastic surgery taking hold her movie declined. In early 2000 a date rumors beyond surfacing of the Hollywood bio epic with Charles Theron playing Hedy. If it was carried ahead maybe the world will see her extra ordinary achievements finally giving their due recognition.
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