Hedy Lamarr

Hedwig Kiesler was the only child of a Vienna bank director and a pianist, and she forged her parents' signature at sixteen to get work as a film extra. At eighteen she starred in Ecstasy, a Czech film notorious for showing her face in simulated orgasm, banned in the United States and Germany. That year she married Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer close to Mussolini and Hitler, over her Jewish parents' objections. She later described the marriage as a kind of captivity, calling herself a doll, though it put her in the room for Mandl's meetings with military engineers. In 1937 she fled him, reached London, talked her way onto Louis B. Mayer's ocean liner to New York, and stepped off it as Hedy Lamarr, MGM's newest contract star.

On screen she became MGM's reigning exotic beauty, from Algiers in 1938 through White Cargo and 1949's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing release of its year. Off screen she worked with composer George Antheil on a way to keep radio-guided torpedoes from being jammed: a transmitter and receiver that hopped between frequencies in a pattern synchronized like a player piano. They patented the idea in 1942 under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, and handed it to the Navy for free. The Navy filed it away as impractical for a torpedo and suggested she sell war bonds instead, which she did. The patent expired in 1959, three years before anyone built a working version, and by the time frequency hopping became the basis of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, the world had largely forgotten who invented it.

Fame did not carry over into the rest of her life. Lamarr married and divorced six times and had a fractured relationship with her adopted son, James, who did not speak to her for nearly fifty years and later learned through DNA testing that neither Lamarr nor his adoptive father was biologically related to him at all — he sued her estate after her death and settled for 50,000 dollars. A ghostwritten 1966 memoir, Ecstasy and Me, embarrassed her with invented material and drew a lawsuit from her own hand against its publisher. She was arrested for shoplifting twice, in 1966 and again in 1991 in Orlando, the second time over 21 dollars and 48 cents in laxatives and eye drops. By the early 1980s, with her eyesight failing, she had withdrawn almost entirely from public life.

Lamarr died of heart disease in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, remembered mostly as a Hollywood face from four decades earlier. The engineering credit arrived almost entirely after the fact: the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her and Antheil a Pioneer Award in 1997, the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted her in 2014, and a 2017 documentary, Bombshell, retold the story to an audience that mostly had not heard it. Vienna, her birth city, unveiled a memorial for her ashes in 2014 and named a street after her, and satellite programs have since put her name on hardware in orbit, an actress once sold purely as a face now credited with a patent that outlasted most of her films.

Hedy Lamarr's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ecstasy film
  Banned in the U.S. and Germany for its nude and simulated-orgasm scenes 1933
• Algiers film
  Her Hollywood debut and first sensation 1938
• Samson and Delilah film
  Highest-grossing film of 1950 1949
• Secret Communication System patent
  U.S. Patent 2,292,387, co-invented with George Antheil 1942

• November 9, 1914 aged 0 Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary
• August 10, 1933 aged 18 Marries arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl
• 1937 aged ~23 Flees the marriage and reaches Hollywood via Louis B. Mayer
• 1938 aged ~24 Algiers makes her an overnight star
• August 11, 1942 aged 27 Granted a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum with George Antheil
• 1949 aged ~35 Stars in Samson and Delilah, the top-grossing film of 1950
• 1966 aged ~52 Publishes the ghostwritten memoir Ecstasy and Me and later sues its publisher
• 1997 aged ~83 Receives the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for the 1942 patent
• January 19, 2000 aged 85 Dies in Casselberry, Florida

• Judy Garland 1922–1969
  Actress and singer best known for The Wizard of Oz, whose life and talent became emblematic of Hollywood. co-starred with her in Ziegfeld Girl
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. overlooked woman inventor honored in a similar late reapprai