Leader in blue movies, and bluetooth
UNITED STATES: Hedy Lamarr was used to career firsts. She was the first mainstream actress to fake an orgasm on-screen and among the first to appear nude. As a consequence she was also the first to be condemned by a Pope.
A film has been made that describes a different kind of first in the career of the early Hollywood siren. She also developed a frequency-hopping technique for evading radio jamming.
Lamarr was repeatedly referred to in the 1930s and 40s as ‘‘the most beautiful woman in the world’’. Those looks brought her film roles, notably Delilah in Samson and Delilah.
But she struggled to be taken seriously, not least because her appearance in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, involved nudity and sex.
She later said: ‘‘The brains of people are more interesting than the looks, I think.’’ But few took notice of the filing of US Patent No 2,292,387, outlining a secret communication system.
Now a documentary coproduced by the actress Susan Sarandon will tell the story of Lamarr, who died in 2000, aged 85. Bombshell: the Hedy Lamarr Story will focus on that one invention, which is similar to systems used in Bluetooth.
Her first marriage, of six, was to an Austrian arms dealer in 1933. She fled to America but not before picking up an understanding of munitions and weaponry from dinner party chat with Nazi generals. She said that Mussolini and Hitler had visited their house.
When World War II broke out she decided to use some of that knowledge to defeat the fascists and came up with the idea for a radio signal that would hop from frequency to frequency in order to make it unjammable.
She discussed the scheme with George Antheil, a composer, at a party given by the Oscar-winning actress Janet Gaynor. Then, before leaving, she left him her number, written in lipstick on his windscreen.
Together they developed the patent as well as a prototype system for creating the frequencyhopping device based on the mechanisms in self-playing pianos.
Other inventors had been working on similar systems and the US signals corps was trying to develop a more sophisticated method of evading jammers.
Lamarr foresaw the technology being used in radio-guided torpedoes but Antheil thought that the navy might be sceptical. ‘‘I can see them saying, ‘We shall put a player piano in a torpedo’,’’ he said.
Although his intention was that it would be miniaturised, he was right to be worried. The system was ignored until the 1960s when a variant was installed in ships involved in the Cuban blockade.
Frequency hopping is now used as standard in many communications, including in modern Bluetooth devices. In 2014, more than a decade after her death, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Even without formal recognition she never seemed to have doubts about her intellectual abilities, which also led her to help the tycoon Howard Hughes with aircraft design. ‘‘Inventions are easy for me to do,’’ she said in one of her last interviews. ‘‘I suppose I just came from a different planet.’’
– The Times