Hedy Lamarr: A Brilliant Beauty

   

                                     Publicity photo of Hedy Lamarr, 1940

     In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. A month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and World War I began. Later that year, on November 9, Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna.

     Originally named Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, she was the only child in a wealthy Jewish family. As a child, Hedy was fascinated by her father’s explanations of how different machines operated. At age 5 she took apart and reassembled her music box to see how it worked. Her mother, a concert pianist, sparked Hedy’s interest in the art—especially theatre and the movies.     

     That led to her taking acting lessons and, when she was sixteen, she landed a role as an extra in a movie produced by the largest Austrian film production company of the era. Thus she began her acting career. After a small speaking role in another film by the same company the next year, she was discovered by the prominent director Max Reinhardt. He cast her in a play in Vienna and was so impressed with her performance that he took her with him to Berlin. Although she didn’t appear in any of his productions there, she was cast in several films directed by others using the name Hedy Kietzler.

      When she was 18, she played the lead in the film that would make her internationally famous—or infamous—Ecstasy. Her character was the beautiful young wife of an apathetic older man. The film quickly became notorious for showing the actors’ faces in the throes of orgasm and for the brief nude scenes which, unbeknownst to Hedy, had been filmed using powerful telephoto lenses. The film was applauded as an artistic work throughout Europe, but the Pope condemned it and Germany banned it. In America, negative publicity for being too explicit resulted in it being banned there, too. Disillusioned, Hedy returned to the stage.

     In that same year, 1933, Hedy met Fritz Mandl, a military munitions manufacturer and dealer who was one of the richest men in Austria. She married him despite her parents’ disapproval of his ties to Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini and later to Adolph Hitler. She stated in her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, that he prevented her from pursuing her acting career and kept her a virtual prisoner in their home. Although unhappy in her marriage, she gained a great deal of knowledge of Nazi wartime weaponry through Mandel and his business associates. She fled to England in 1937 to escape from her husband.

                                  Hedy Lamarr In Dishonored Lady, 1947

     While in London, she met Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios who was scouting talent in Europe. . That meeting resulted in a film contract and she moved to Hollywood in 1938. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr and promoted her as “the world’s most beautiful woman.” During her association with MGM, she made more than 20 films.

      Through her acting career, Hedy met and dated Howard Hughes, who inspired her to use her scientific mind. He showed her how airplanes were built in his factories and introduced her to the scientists who were working on his dream of faster planes to sell to the military. Hedy studied the anatomies of the fastest fish species and fastest bird species then combined their fins and wings to develop a new wing design for his planes. When she showed it to him, he reportedly called her a genius.

     In 1940, Hedy was already concerned about the course of war in Europe. She learned that radio frequencies were being used to control torpedoes, a new development in naval warfare. She also discovered that the signals could easily be jammed, setting the torpedoes off course. Working with her friend composer and pianist George Antheil, she drafted ideas for a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. He was able to help her develop a method for synchronizing the radio signals between the transmitter and receiver using a mechanism that was based on the player piano. Their designs for this frequency-hopping communication system were patented in August 1942.

                         Patent # 2,292,387 for a "Secret Communication System,"                                     granted to actress Hedy Lamarr

     The U.S. Navy decided against adopting their system, so Hedy turned her war efforts to using her celebrity status to help sell war bonds. But her frequency-hopping technology was far ahead of its time. Many years later, after the patent had expired, frequency-hopping provided the basis for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS systems.

     In 1997, Hedy and Antheil finally received recognition for their invention within the scientific community. She died in January 2000.

 Ann Markim

 Website

Facebook

                        

 Buy Links: Paperback at Amazon                     Amazon print or digital

Amazon Kindle