Hedy Lamarr The Most Beautiful Woman in Hollywood Was a Secret Inventor

Hollywood called her the most beautiful woman in the world. She was also an inventor, and the Navy turned her idea down.

Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna in 1914. At 18 she was famous across Europe, and that same year she married Fritz Mandl, an arms dealer and one of the richest men in Austria. At his dinners and meetings she listened to engineers talk about weapons. In 1937 she fled, met the boss of MGM, and became Hedy Lamarr, "the most beautiful woman in the world".

During the Second World War she had an idea: radio-guided torpedoes could be jammed, so make the signal jump between frequencies in a pattern only the ship and the torpedo know. With the composer George Antheil, who knew how to keep player pianos in sync, she designed a system with 88 frequencies, like the 88 keys of a piano. They patented it in 1942. The Navy rejected it and told her to sell war bonds instead. The patent ran out in 1959, and only after that did the military start using the idea. In 1997 she finally received an award for her invention, and in 2014 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, frequency hopping is part of Bluetooth.