Hedwig Kiesler/ later Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) left Vienna and moved to the USA in 1937 and continued her illustrious film career. But within a few years her film career became less satisfying, presumably because of her naked scenes in some films that were soon banned in the US and because she already had a decadent reputation. So she focused more on science and inventions.
She already knew maths very well and had picked up practical munitions-engineering knowledge from her charming but Fascist ex-husband Fritz Mandl. How ironic! If one of Mandl's favourite topics in his gatherings was the technology of radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes, did the American government acknowledge Hedy’s military knowledge and want to exploit it? [No; they didn’t utilise her genius, even in WW2]. Were the Germans interested in how much knowledge she took with her to the USA after 1937?
Lamarr dated pilot Howard Hughes but she was most interested with his desire for innovation. Hughes pushed the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, Lamarr worked on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought books of fish and of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he thought she was a genius.
How much expertise was she developing with American composer George Antheil in the USA where they met? Antheil was himself well connected, having earlier married Hungarian Boski Markus, the niece of star Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Antheil successfully experimented with electronic musical instruments and devised a punch-card-like device that could synchronise a transmitter and receiver. They were interested in many inventions, but of their greatest concerns was the hideous war in Europe.
Giving her credit did not help the frequency-hopping idea; even when the USA finally joined the Allies, the discovery was never applied by the American military during WW2. Even though she became an American citizen in April 1953, the real payoff of frequency-intervention came only decades later. Eventually it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Blue-tooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. In fact Lamarr came to be referred to as "The Mother of Wi-Fi" and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth. Too late, of course, for Lamarr and Antheil.
After WW2, Lamarr continued to act in films and on television. Her biggest hit was Samson and Delilah in 1949. She took American citizenship in 1953 and in 1960, she was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1967 Lamarr wrote an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, but sued her ghost writers because the book was scandalous. She complained that she’d had a $7 million income but was now subsisting on a grotty pension. More litigation followed in 1974. The story of her radio transmission invention became widely publicised but she didn’t earn an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award until 1997. She died in 2000 and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
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22 comments:
Hedy Lamarr’s remarkable journey from dazzling Hollywood icon to overlooked wartime inventor highlights not only her brilliance and resilience, but also the tragic delay in recognising the true value of her scientific contributions
Who would have thought. I knew her by name as being an actor but she was far more than that. As with Kristofferson, there can be so much about some famous people that the general public does not know.
how intelligent and pioneering!!
At least her work, or part of it, was recognized, albeit late!!
Thank you very much for all this information,
I would not have imagined what was behind this actress!!
I knew a lot of what you have written Hels. I was reading about her earlier in the year - just not a pretty face for sure.
Fritz Mandl was scientifically helpful to Hedy but brutal as well. What was she thinking?
Hedy Lamarr had an interesting life! She was a talented actress and a brilliant scientist.
roentare
why were her scientific contributions undervalued and then delayed?
1. She was a woman and therefore "had to be scientifically dumb"
2. She was naked in some films and therefore unacceptable in most circles
3. Her first husband was a mega-rich arms maker supplying the nazis when she was only 18.
4. Her parents were both Jewish but Mandl made her convert to Catholicism
5. German was her mother tongue. Even her English had a German accent.
6. She had 6 husbands and their children to spend her time on.
7. Her invention was handed to the Navy during the war but totally rejected on technical grounds. Noone was asked to continue or improve her work.
Andrew
true that... but who makes the decision to keep the famous person's name away from the general public? After all, her naked film clips were publicised in every newspaper in Austria and the U.S. And her famous film Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1950, won two Oscars! Best of all her name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame!
But the newspapers barely covered the clever scientific progress of Hedy Lamarr and her hard working colleagues.
Katerina
I too knew all about her work as an actress and a film producer, but knew nothing at all about her science until a few years ago. Perhaps read
"Hedy Lamarr, Radio-Controlled Torpedo" by Hans-Joachim Braun in
Invention & Technology:
https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/hedy-lamarr-radio-controlled-torpedo
Margaret
me too. She had a fabulous face, great body and impressive acting skills.
Forbes wrote: But it is her technical mind that is her greatest legacy, according to the American documentary ‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.’ The film chronicles the patent that LaMarr filed for frequency-hopping technology in 1941 that became a precursor to the secure wi-fi, GPS and Bluetooth now used by billions of people around the world.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/shivaunefield/2018/02/28/hedy-lamarr-the-incredible-mind-behind-secure-wi-fi-gps-bluetooth/
Irina
interesting and very successful, but I doubt that she was happy very often. In particular, her family life (with all her husbands and children) was unstable.
Did you see any of her films, either from the 1930s in Europe or her Hollywood films from later?
Great minds think alike. I just started reading a book about Heddy Lamar. I knew a bit about her non-movie side too. What a woman just to break out from one major career to another that was so different. And of course, science didn't appreciate woman in that field for so many years. It was really a man's world.
Helen, I am sorry but I've never seen Hedy Lamarr's films.
Irina
My dad was a few years younger than Hedy, and in the 1930s and 40s he thought she was stunning :)
Erika
Film people and newspapers thought women could not manage top-level science, but the military and universities should have know better. Especially in desperate times.
I believe it was out public television station had a documentary about her.
peppylady
Helen said she had not seen any public newspaper coverage until the late 1990s. And it was too late in Hedy's life for her to participate in the discussions. What a shame :(
this sooooooo annoying to read about , I bet if she had been a HANDSOME MAN she would have been taken more seriously . I am so sick of men's attitudes to women and their capacity to be amazing in the cerebral world . Think of the loss to humanity when 1/2 the population is discounted as a "pretty little thing " . Howard Hughes has gone up n my estimation . Weird but at least he could see her as a mind rather than just a gorgeous body and face.
What's even worse though is when women give up on themselves as well . So Sad .
mem
Because Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914, most people said she was before the women's movement reached its best decades and she would never have been encouraged to enter the world of mechanics, science and communications. Or even tolerated, if she went into the science world by herself.
But as you noted Howard Hughes was committed to aviation, engineering, aerospace science and was a skilled piot. And as it appeared that the US was eventually going to get involved in WW2, Hughes and others mentored Lamarr, took her to tour airplane factories, introduced her to the scientists working in her relevant teams and bought her equipment.
So she was a very clever woman AND a lucky one.
Joe
I know as an 18 year old, Hedy was tired of her parents' control but she couldn't leave home until she met Fritz Mandl, very handsome, very rich, scientifically clever and happy to marry her. But Mandl was a controlling male.. with Fascist politics, and within 3.5 years they had divorced.
I knew some of this having watched something about her life not long ago, she was far more then just an actress, she had a brain and she used it just sad that some people didn't see how smart she was.
Jo-Anne
I agree totally. There were plenty of scientists and mechanical experts around who saw all her talents, yet they weren't strong enough to publically encourage her contributions during the war years. Not only Hedy's loss... also the USA's loss.
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