Female Jewish Scientists

An aspiring Jewish actress from

Austria, who escaped her Nazi arms dealer husband and rose to fame and fortune in Hollywood. She married six times and in her spare time was a self-taught scientist whose inventions would influence the development of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth...to say the life of Hedy Lamarr was eventful would be a seismic understatement.

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna. Her father a wealthy Jewish bank director and her mother a pianist from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began an interest in invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how technology functioned. Lamarr began taking acting classes in Vienna in early 1933. At age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in the Czech movie Ecstasy. The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's close-up face in the throes of orgasm as well as brief nude scenes. Pope Pius XII denounced the film, Hitler & America banned it, but the film gained worldwide recognition. Lamarr had made a name for herself. During that same year, 18 year old Lamarr met her first husband, a wealthy 33-year-old Austrian arms dealer and manufacturer called Friedrich Mandl. Lamarr’s Jewish parents, disapproved of the union mainly due to Mandl’s strong fascist views and ties with Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom were reported to have attended parties hosted by Mandl. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. She disappeared to Paris before moving to London where she met Louis D Mayer, head of MGM who was scouting for talent in Europe. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr and brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman". Her features were so striking they were said to have inspired Walt Disney’s Snow White character created that year. She eventually starred in twenty five films alongside Hollywood’s leading stars. Many of Lamarr's roles emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom. However, she was never able to achieve a successful marriage. Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children. Cecile B. DeMille cast her as the ultimate femme fatale, Delilah, in his film Samson and Delilah in 1949 and the film was to be Lamarr’s greatest box-office success. However, her follow-up movies

didn’t fare so well. Lamarr’s career went into decline and her final film appearance came in 1958. Her life had already been a rollercoaster ride and in retirement, the ride continued to show no signs of coming to an end. By 1966 she divorced her sixth and last husband. A scandalous memoir of her life, entitled Ecstasy and Me, was also published that year in which the lurid details of her sex life had been written down for all to see. She also sued Mel Brooks for mocking her name in his film Blazing Saddles (1974). They settled out of court. In recent years her legacy has been transformed and she’s now remembered more for her brains than for her looks. Lamarr was a great inventor. In between shoots, she would retire to her trailer and tinker with her inventions. She was a very gifted scientist and on top of that she was completely self-taught. Some who knew of Lamarr’s talents, included the eccentric aviation inventor Howard Hughes, a one-time flame of Lamarr’s. Lamarr helped Hughes find a way to make his planes fly faster. She believed his current wing designs were too square, so she brought a couple books, one about birds and one about fish. She studied their anatomies and concluded that the wing shapes on Hughes’ planes needed to be more streamlined to help reduce drag. Hughes declared her a genius. The true extent of Lamarr’s scientific talent was shown, although not fully appreciated, during the war. When Lamarr heard that 80 children had been killed after a German U-boat sank a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic, she became desperate to help the Allied cause. It didn’t take long for her to discover just how she was going to do that. Lamarr worked with composer George Antheil to develop a new way to steer torpedoes. She had already discovered that radio-signals used to control torpedoes could be jammed by the Nazis, making them miss their targets, and she wanted to come up with an unjammable alternative. The pair settled on a system that would randomly switch to different radio frequencies to get around jamming, known as frequency-hopping (FH) spread spectrum communication. It was controlled by a piano player mechanism of Antheil’s, meaning the system could switch between one of 88 different frequencies for each of the 88 black and white keys on a piano. Lamarr and Antheil patented their invention in 1942, but although initially rejected it was classified by the US Navy as secret until 1981.The Navy returned to her idea in the 50s once the system could be developed electronically. By the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the technology had been fully embraced by the military. Her invention would go to become the foundation for secure telecommunications and would be used in the development of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth. Our modern world would not function as it does without Lamarr’s invention. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s patent expired before she ever saw a penny from her inventive genius which was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received several awards for her invention. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 for the development of her frequency hopping technology . Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.