Hedy Lamarr: The Brain Behind the Icon
IMAGE SOURCE: ©1995 - 2018, AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
I first heard of Hedy Lamarr not as an actress neither as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, which people remember her for, but as an inventor. I was watching several maths talks with my class, and one of the speakers mentioned her name, explaining the concept of frequency hopping, an idea which she had come up with and is used by over 6.8 billion people worldwide today. I went home that day and found out more information about her. After seeing a picture of her, I certainly understood what she meant when she said: “My beauty is my curse”. With those dazzling blue eyes, trendsetting dark hair, and the perfectly arched eyebrows, all of which formed the basis for the looks of Snow White and Cat Woman, it’s no wonder that people couldn’t see past her face.
I went to see Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story last week, and was amazed by how well the director, Alexandra Dean, and the executive producer, Susan Sarandon, had put the documentary together. I was also inspired by their commitment to the project, since they began everything again, discarding six months of filming, after having found tapes from an interview with the actress, which then formed the basis of the documentary. The film was both inspiring and touching and I was glad to see the inventor and actress get the recognition she deserved.
Hedwig Kiesler was born to a rich Austrian Jewish family, and although she wanted to act, she had always had a passion for Chemistry at school, and inventions. She credited her father for nurturing that interest, saying, “My father would take me around Austria and tell me how things worked.” Indeed, the father-daughter relationship in the family was particularly close, with Hedy confirming that no man she had ever met could match the love she had for her father.
After small roles in Austrian films, Hedy became world-notorious in 1933 for her racy, at times nude performance in Ecstasy, with audiences being so shocked that the film was even banned in countries such as Germany. Trapped in a loveless marriage to Fritz Mandl, an arms dealer working with Hitler and Mussolini, Hedy’s interest in Chemistry first became useful when she created a potion to put her husband and their guests for dinner to sleep. She then disguised herself as her maid, sewed her jewels inside the frock pockets and fled to Paris, where she met Louis B Mayer, the founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Persuaded by her beauty and persistence, Mayer ended up offering her $500 a week, and Lamarr, who didn’t speak a word of English at the time, soon became a star. She occupied many magazine covers, influenced other well-known actresses like Vivienne Leigh to die their hair darker and part it down the middle, and starred in high-grossing films alongside Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy.
Behind that beautiful face, however, was a mind full of ideas waiting to be heard. When the Americans joined the war in 1939, Lamarr decided that she felt guilty making millions in LA while soldiers were suffering. She heard about how American torpedoes would miss their target since German ships could jam them by finding out their frequency. While she was using a remote control to switch stations on her Philco radio (the latest bestselling invention) from across the room, she was inspired to use radio to control torpedoes in a similar way. She thought that synchronising a radio transmitter and receiver to change their tuning simultaneously, hopping constantly from random frequency to frequency, would mean that the radio signal passing between them couldn’t be intercepted. Her friend George Antheil, an unconventional composer who had some experience with munition, and whose younger brother had died in a plane crash in the war, was committed to help her physically carry out the idea. During his concert at Carnegie Hall in 1927, Antheil had managed to synchronise four pianos, enabling them to play by themselves. To achieve this, he had placed identical piano rolls (rolls of ribbon with marks on them), in the pianos, so that the marks on the rolls would set each antenna to a particular frequency, playing keys as a result. Antheil decided to place another identical set of rolls in the ship and in the torpedo, so that they could keep jumping frequencies simultaneously, whilst staying connected.
The pair worked together on the invention for over a year, and were granted a patent on August 11th 1942. Unfortunately, the navy rejected the idea, calling it “too bulky and unreliable to use with a torpedo”. Little did they know how useful the invention would later be during other battles, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lamarr was told by Charles F. Kettering, a member of the National Inventors Council, which she wanted to join, that she would do better to use her fame to sell war bonds than create pointless inventions. She therefore entertained soldiers and raised money by offering to kiss anyone who purchased $25,000 worth of war bonds. In one night alone, she managed to raise a record-breaking $7 million.
After her fundraising, Lamarr resumed her acting career, starring in acclaimed films, her biggest success being her role as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the second highest-grossing film of the decade, after Gone With The Wind.
Although frequency hopping was Hedy’s most well-known invention, it wasn’t the only one. She had many more creative ideas, one of which included a glass’s worth of Coca-Cola compressed in a single ice cube, which she thought could be distributed to soldiers in the war. Unfortunately the idea failed, since Hedy was unaware that different countries had different water concentrations in tap water. Changing the shape of plane wings from square to triangular to make them more streamlined, enabling them to travel faster was also her idea, which she suggested to Howard Hughes.
In the last thirty years of her life, Hedy became more and more miserable. She remained unmarried, after her previous six matches had failed. She sued the publisher of “Ecstasy and Me” a book rumoured to be her autobiography, claiming that many details were made up by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr was also accused of shoplifting twice, which was disastrous for her career. A certain “Dr. Feelgood”, the protagonist of Aretha Franklin’s famous song, was employed by Hedy (as well as many other film stars) to give her injections. She thought that they contained vitamins, but they were in fact shots of meth, which made her increasingly hard to live with and violent. Her adopted son, James, even asked to live with another family when he was twelve, which made Hedy broken inside. Hedy was aging, and underwent plastic surgery several times to regain her beauty, but it only ruined her face further. Journalists were cruel to her, calling her “old and ugly”, and she was mocked at by Mel Brooks and Lucille Ball. Aware that she had lost her only asset; her beauty, Hedy became a social recluse, reluctant to go out and even unwilling to see her own family.
Hedy and George’s frequency hopping submission didn’t perish in a navy file cabinet, however. It was eventually used by the military during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. Hedy was furious that she was given no credit for her work, since the patent had expired. Even so, patent law states that the patent holder still has six years to sue after the expiry date. Hedy didn’t know, and so made no money from it.
Hedy was finally congratulated and recognised for her invention, winning the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award in 1977, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, her reaction to which was: “Well, it’s about time”. Lamarr was also featured on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Frequency Hopping was a revolutionary idea, becoming the foundation for cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, as well as being used in the army. If trends continue, it has been reported that everyone in the world will be connected by frequency hopping, and the idea is worth £300 billion today. Unfortunately, Hedy Lamarr didn’t make a cent from her invention.
Some people still don’t believe Hedy’s idea to be original, claiming that she was already an American spy, stealing ideas from her first husband, Fritz Mandl, at the dinner table. Hedy denied these claims, saying that ideas came naturally come to her, and that she pursued them without question.
The documentary ends with a hopeful poem written by Hedy Lamarr for her children, which Alexandra Dean summarises as: “You might not ever be seen for who you really are or receive the recognition you deserve, but do it anyway. That’s what gives your life meaning.”
I cannot imagine a better film for International Women’s Day – and thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. Who knows, perhaps she’ll soon be featuring in physics textbooks!