Hedy Lamarr was not only the first to appear nude in film and depicted orgasm on camera, but she also invented a communication system with interception protection.
I think peopleās brains are more interesting than their appearance.
said the Hollywood actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr in 1990, ten years before her death.
Hedy Lamarr was a charming actress from the 1940s, known to the world not only for her striking beauty and successful acting career but also for her truly remarkable intellectual abilities.
Hedy, often confused in photos with another beauty of 20th century cinema, Vivien Leigh (Scarlett, 'Gone with the Wind'), gave the world the opportunity to use frequency-hopping communication (thanks to which we can use mobile phones and Wi-Fi today).
Vivien Leigh and Hedy Lamarr
The life journey and career of this extraordinary woman were challenging yet captivating and remarkable.
Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. Her mother, Gertrude Lichtwitz, was a pianist, and her father, Emil Kiesler, was a bank director. Her mother was from Budapest, and her father came from a Jewish family living in Lviv.
Since childhood, she captivated everyone with her abilities and talent. She studied ballet, attended drama school, played the piano, and passionately studied mathematics. As the family was well-off, there was no need to work at a young age, yet Hedy left her parental home at 16 and enrolled in drama school. By the age of 17, she began her film career, debuting in 1930 in the German film 'Girls in the Nightclub.' She continued her film career, working on German and Czechoslovak films.
The beginning of her career was quite successful, but over the next three years she was just one of many; it was the Czechoslovak-Austrian film 'Ecstasy' by Gustav Machaty that brought her worldwide fame. The film was provocative and controversial for 1933.
A ten-minute scene of nude bathing in a forest lake may seem innocent by the standards of the 21st century, but at the time it sparked a storm of emotions. In some countries, the film was even banned from screening and was only released several years later with censorship.
Hedy Lamarr in the film "Ecstasy," 1933.
The uproar around the film and the fierce outrage from the church worked to the actress's advantage, as it made her scandalously famous. At that moment, it was not the nude nature itself that caused the scandal, but rather the overwhelming emotions triggered by the first-ever simulated orgasm scene in film history, convincingly portrayed by the actress. Later, she recounted that the director had deliberately pricked her with a pin during the erotic scene to make her sounds sound more believable.
After the scandalous film, her parents went to great lengths to marry their daughter off quickly. Hedy's first husband was an Austrian, Fritz Mandlāa millionaire arms manufacturer who supported the Nazis and produced weapons for the Third Reich. Traveling with her husband to meetings and conferences, Hedy listened attentively and remembered everything the men talked aboutāinteresting conversations at that time, as Mandl's production labs were working on creating remote-controlled weapons for the Nazis. However, this fact would become significant much later.
Her husband turned out to be a terrible possessive man, jealous of her every encounter. It ended with the young wife being literally locked in her "golden cage", unable to act in films or even meet with friends. He even tried to buy up all the copies of "Ecstasy" from Viennese screenings. The nightmarish marriage lasted four years, but unable to endure such treatment, the unhappy wife of the wealthy and powerful ammunition manufacturer escaped one night after drugging the maid with sleeping pills and wearing her clothes, fleeing the house on a bicycle and boarding the steamship "Normandie."
She emigrated to the USA on the eve of World War II and met the head of MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Louis B. Mayer, on a ship traveling from London to New York. Lamarr spoke a little English, which turned out to be helpful as she was able to secure a lucrative contract to act in Hollywood films.
To avoid any unwanted associations with the American puritanical audience, she adopted a pseudonym, taking it from the MGM actress Barbara La Marr, a former favorite of Mayer who died in 1926 from a heart rupture related to drug abuse.
A new phase of her career unfolds successfully. Throughout her Hollywood career, the actress starred in popular films such as 'Algiers' (1938, as Gaby), 'Lady of the Tropics' (1939, as Manon de Verne), the adaptation of John Steinbeck's 'Tortilla Flat' (1942, directed by Victor Fleming, as Dolores Ramirez), 'Experiment in Terror' (1944), 'The Strange Woman' (1946), and Cecil B. DeMille's epic 'Samson and Delilah' (1949). Her last appearance on screen was in the film 'The Female Animal' (1958, as Vanessa Windsor).
Her acting career was not hindered, even though during this period, Lamarr became a mother to three children. However, this information is conflicting across different sources, as one of the children may not have been her biological son.
Hedy left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1945. In total, Hedy Lamarr earned 30 million dollars from her film work.
The Viennese beauty found a life in Beverly Hills and mingled with famous figures like John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes, who provided her with equipment for conducting experiments in her trailer while she was not filming. It was in this scientific environment that Lamarr discovered her true calling.
Hedy Lamarr was a loving, passionate, and fickle woman, occasionally seeking novelty. It is no surprise that in addition to her legal spouses, of whom there were six throughout her life, the actress had many lovers.
Two years after fleeing from her first husband, Lamarr remarried. Her second husband was screenwriter and producer Gene Markey, who adored his wife, though Hedy was not in love with him. Despite having a loving husband, she had an affair with actor John Loder and even had a child by him (according to some sources). Markey agreed to accept Hedy's son because he couldn't imagine his life without this glamorous woman. However, a couple of years later, she divorced him anyway, and Lamarr began living with the father of her child, John Loder, with whom they soon formalized their relationship.
The actress's third marriage lasted 4 years. During this time, she had two more children with Loder: a son and a daughter. In 1947, she expressed her desire to divorce. This was followed by three more official marriages: to restaurateur and musician Teddy Stauffer (1951-1952), oilman William Howard Lee (1953-1960), and lawyer Lewis Boies (1963-1965).
As we see, Hedy Lamarr's fate was not particularly happy. Six marriages did not bring her joy. Her relationships with her three children were also far from ideal.
Often called "the most beautiful woman in films," Hedy Lamarr's beauty and screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her time.
Certainly, her acting career brought fame to Lamarr, but true immortality came from her scientific endeavors.
As if being a beautiful, talented actress was not enough, Hedy was also extremely intelligent and engaged in inventing. She had a good knowledge of mathematics and, thanks to her first husband, became well-versed in weaponry.
Her abilities and their application were enhanced by a meeting with avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil. After talking with the actress, he realized that his companion was much smarter than she appeared.
Lamarre was fascinated by his use of unusual tools and arrangements in his music and loved to tinker and invent, just as she did. Hedy inspired his method of using multiple player pianos with perforated rolls, allowing the playback to switch from one instrument to another without compromising the music (literally 'not missing a beat'). Later, they successfully patented the brilliant technology of pseudorandom frequency hopping (PFH), embodying the aforementioned idea of using perforated rolls to protect radio waves from jamming. Just as the meticulous synchronization of perforated rolls ensures the continuity of music played on different pianos, the radio signal switches from one channel to another.
This idea later became the foundation for both secure military communication and mobile phone technology. In August 1942, she, along with composer George Antheil, received patent number 2,292,387 for the 'Secret Communication System,' allowing for the remote control of torpedoes. The value of the 'frequency-hopping' technology was only appreciated many years later. The impetus for the invention was a report about the sinking of an evacuation ship on September 17, 1940, which resulted in the death of 77 children. Her extraordinary abilities in the exact sciences enabled her to reproduce many technical details of the weapon discussions held by her first husband with his colleagues.
Together with George, they began inventing a remote-controlled torpedo that could not be intercepted or jammed. Lamarr shared a very important idea with Antheil: if the coordinates of a target are communicated to the guided torpedo over a single frequency, the enemy can easily intercept the signal, jam it, or redirect the torpedo to another target. However, by using a random code on the transmitter that changes the transmission channel, one can synchronize the same frequency shifts on the receiver. This channel switching ensures secure information transmission. Until that time, pseudorandom codes were used for encrypting information transmitted over unchanging open communication channels. Here, however, there was a leap forward: a secret key was employed to rapidly change information transmission channels.
A figure from the 1942 patent. Image: Flickr / Floor, distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
The original idea, aimed at solving the problem of enemy jamming of remote-controlled missiles during World War II, involved simultaneously changing radio frequencies to prevent enemies from detecting the signal. She wanted to provide her country with a military advantage. While the technologies of the time initially made it impossible to realize the idea, the emergence of the transistor and its subsequent reduction made Hedy's concept extremely significant for both military and cellular communications.
However, the U.S. Navy rejected the project at the time due to its complexity, and it was only limitedly used beginning in 1962, meaning the inventors did not receive compensation for it. Yet half a century later, this patent became the foundation for wideband communication, which is now used everywhere, from mobile phones to Wi-Fi.
"It's easy for me to invent," Lamarr said in 'Bombshell.' "I don't have to think of ideas; they come to me."
However, according to a new documentary about her life, her technical thinking is her greatest legacy. It's called "Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story." The film discusses the patent Lamarr filed for frequency-hopping technology in 1941, which became the precursor to secure Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Frequency-hopping spread spectrum is one of the most crucial aspects of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), which is used in many technologies we rely on today. One of the first was GPS, which you use every time you check your location in a map app on your smartphone. Mobile phones also used CDMA for telephone signals, and if you've ever downloaded anything over a 3G network, you leveraged technology based on Lamarr's and Antheil's inventions. The frequency-hopping technology is all around us, easily taken for granted, but the invention deserves admiration and respect for being so creative and ingenious.
However, Lamarr did not receive the fame and compensation she deserved for her ideas. The patent she filed jointly with inventor George Antheil aimed to protect their military invention for radio communication that could "jump" from one frequency to another so that the Nazis couldn't detect Allied torpedoes. To this day, neither Lamarr nor her estate has received a dime from the multibillion-dollar industry for which her idea paved the way, although the U.S. military publicly acknowledged her patent for frequency hopping and her contribution to technology.
Lamarr's work as an inventor was hardly publicized in the 1940s. This oversight, which is believed by director of "Bombshell" and co-founder of Reframed Pictures Alexandra Dean, fits into the narrow narrative of the movie star in those days.
Professor Jan-Kristopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, states in "Bombshell" that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who first signed a Hollywood contract with Lamarr, believed that women fell into two categories: they were either seductive or needed to be placed on a pedestal to be admired from afar. Professor Horak believes that a woman who is both sexual and admirable was not someone Mayer was prepared to accept or present to audiences.
This impressive technological achievement, combined with her acting talent and star quality, made āthe most beautiful woman in filmā one of the most intriguing and intelligent women in the film industry.
āLouis B. Mayer divided the world into two types of women: Madonna and whore. I donāt think he ever believed she was anything but the latter,ā says Horak in the film, referring to Lamarr.
Dr. Simon Nayak, chair of the branding department at ESSEC Business School in Paris and a former research fellow at Harvard Business School, agrees that Hollywood classifies women in a binary manner. Dr. Nayak teaches 'The Anthropology of Powerful Brands' at ESSEC and is an expert in the use of female archetypes in advertising and media.
According to Dr. Nayak, women are positioned as one of three archetypes: powerful and intelligent queens, the seductive princess, or the femme fatale, which is a combination of both. He notes that these archetypes trace back to Greek mythology and are still used to portray women in media and advertising. Dr. Nayak states that the 'femme fatale' is the category into which the beautiful, brilliant inventor Lamarr fits, and that multidimensional women often appear as quite threatening.
āA powerful, sexual, but intelligent womanā¦ This is really terrifying for most guys,ā says Dr. Nayak. āYouāre just showing how weak we are.ā
Dr. Nyke notes that historically, women have been portrayed in the media in outdated, one-dimensional frameworks created from a male perspective. Within these frameworks, multi-faceted women like Lamarr are often valued only for their physical appearance rather than for their ability to think, invent, and create. This information about the limited capabilities of women is assumed to resonate with an impressive audience worldwide.
"The position of women is almost like that of toys," says Dr. Nyke. "They have no voice. And that's the problem."
Thus, Dr. Nick is not surprised that Lamarrās entrepreneurial efforts in film production and directing during the 1940s went unsupported. Nor that it took decades for the narrative of Lamarr to evolve to acknowledge her as the inventor she was.
Lamarrās daughter, Denise Lauder, takes pride in her motherās inventive mind and the work she did throughout her career to push the boundaries of how women are perceived. She notes that her mom was one of the first women to own a production company and tell stories from a female perspective.
"She was so ahead of her time when she became a feminist," Lauder says in "Bombshell"
("Bombshell"). "She was never called that, but she certainly was."
It took a long time, but Lamarr and Antheil are now widely recognized as the inventors of frequency hopping, which led to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. In 1997, when Lamarr turned 82, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored her with two awards for achievement.
Lamarre did not think of herself as smarter than those around her. Instead, it was her attitude and perspectives in various life situations that set her apart from others. She asked questions. She wanted to improve things. She saw problems and knew they needed to be solved. Some people in her life considered this the wrong attitude, and she was often criticized for being a difficult star. But Lamarre did exactly what she wanted, and as a result, she clearly won. And how did she win? As she said in 'Popcorn in Paradise': I win because many years ago I learned that the one who is afraid to lose money always loses. I donāt care, which is why I win.
She died three years later.
Last year, the Digital Entertainment Group, an American association that supports and promotes entertainment platforms, awarded Gina Davis the Hedy Lamarr Award for innovation in the entertainment industry for her work on gender issues and media. The award recognizes women who have made significant contributions to the entertainment and technology industries.
A few years ago, Lamarre became the subject of a Google Doodle.
So, if you are reading this on your phone, think about the woman who contributed to its creation.
Hedy's unyielding and categorical nature estranged her from all of Hollywood and made her a persona non grata in film circles. Lamarre acted in films until 1958, after which she decided to take a long break. During this time, she wrote her autobiography 'Ecstasy and I' in collaboration with screenwriter Leo Guild and journalist Syme Rice. This book, published in 1966, became a setback for the actress's career.
The work claimed that the girl suffers from nymphomania and engages in sex with both men and women. These details sparked fierce condemnation from Hollywood circles. The inventor denied all the scandalous fragments of the book, claiming that her co-authors secretly added them, but after the scandal, she was never offered star roles again.
After this, the 52-year-old actress attempted to make a comeback on screen, but a widespread campaign of harassment against her hindered this. Her unyielding, blunt nature and her habit of openly expressing unfavorable opinions about Hollywood and its morals garnered her many influential enemies.
In 1997, Lamarr was officially honored for her discovery, but the actress did not attend the ceremony and only sent an audio recording of her greeting.
In her old age, Hedy led a reclusive life and hardly communicated directly with anyone, preferring phone calls.
Overall, Hedy Lamarr's last years were not very joyful, filled with scandals and nasty rumors, and very lonely.
She spent them in a nursing home, where she passed away at the age of 86.
The actress died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000. The cause of Lamarr's death was heart disease. According to her will, her son Anthony Loder scattered her ashes in Austria, in the Vienna Woods.
The contributions of Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil were officially recognized only in 2014: their names were added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
For her contributions and achievements in cinema, Hedy Lamarr was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
And on the actress's birthdayāNovember 9āInventor's Day is celebrated in German-speaking countries.
Sources:
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