LEGENDS:In Hollywood, she set up an inventor's corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp, and all the necessary drafting tools
YOU CAN SAY a lot about the process of invention, but you can hardly call it glamorous – there’s a reason we associate it with cluttered garages and mad scientists. But, as in most fields, there is a notable, and in this case radiant, exception: Hedy Lamarr, 1940s screen siren and secret inventor.
It seems hard to believe the most beautiful film star in Hollywood spent her time between scenes tinkering with prototypes and imagining new technologies, but there was a lot about Lamarr that seemed implausible.
If the life of Hedy Lamarr was a movie you would call it too far-fetched to believe – her controversial early appearances in risqué European cinema, her marriage to a Nazi munitions supplier from whom she escaped, and her subsequent success as the darling of the Hollywood studio system were all dramatic enough for one lifetime, making her groundbreaking inventions seem a very unlikely subplot indeed.
The bizarre truth, as detailed in a new book, Hedy's Follyby Richard Rhodes, is that Lamarr envisioned and was awarded the patent on spread-spectrum radio, a frequency-switching technology that has gone on to underpin a host of modern technologies from defence satellites to Bluetooth.
She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, the daughter of an affluent banker. She moved to Berlin in her teens to attend the famous acting school of Max Reinhardt, who called her “the most beautiful woman in the world”, a statement that ignored her young age. But the tag stuck – even if it somewhat downplayed her intellect.
She first achieved notoriety when she performed what is often considered the first on-screen orgasm in Czech film Extase while still only 19 – the risqué reputation made her famous across Europe. It also led her into a relationship with Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer.
This being the era of Nazism, Mandl inevitably made a fortune selling weapons to Hitler – at one stage the Mandls entertained the Nazi leader when he visited Vienna. But Mandl forbade his wife from continuing her acting career and she soon grew weary of his controlling personality.
Desperate to escape, she boarded the Normandieliner bound for the US in 1937, where she met legendary movie mogul, Louis B Mayer. There was no way he was going to miss the opportunity to enlist "the most beautiful woman in the world" into the Hollywood studio system, and by the time the Normandie berthed in America, Hedy Lamarr, movie star was born.
She took to stardom with aplomb, starring in films such as Ziegfeld Girl, White Cargoand Samson and Delilah– nothing terribly innovative or inventive about any of that.
As Rhodes describes it, “she didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing. In Hollywood, she set up an inventor’s corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp and all the necessary drafting tools.” Her projects were often more conceptual and frequently unworkable, but they demonstrated her curiosity and flair for problem-solving, which ultimately became of critical importance.
Those years with her Nazi munitions-supplying husband were not a complete waste, despite the interruption to her career. He regularly discussed weapons technology with Nazi military leaders in her company, information she soaked up. When the US prepared to enter the second World War, she was keen to put that knowledge to use and considered quitting MGM to work for the National Inventors Council to help the war effort. Instead, she started designing a system of radio control for torpedoes, with the help of another unlikely character.
George Antheil was not the most obvious foil for Lamarr’s inventive talents – he was an avant garde composer and relationship advice columnist for one thing, rather than an engineer or scientist. But together they worked on the problem of accurately controlling torpedoes by radio signals from a high-altitude plane and, in June 1941, they applied for a patent for a “secret communication system”.
Unfortunately, despite considerable effort on their part, the US navy never developed their plans. Instead, Lamarr ended up helping the war effort by selling war bonds instead. Subsequently, however, the Lamarr-Antheil patent came to underpin a lot of military and civilian radio-related technologies.
Recognition for their achievement was rarely forthcoming, however, and in later life Lamarr expressed a degree of bitterness about how her inventive pursuits were overshadowed by her movie stardom and a headline-grabbing lifestyle – she had a total of six husbands, an impressive tally even by Hollywood’s reckoning.
“Any girl can be glamorous,” Lamarr is famously quoted as saying. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Being a glamorous inventor, on the other hand, requires a hell of a lot more brains and effort, as Lamarr proved. She died at the age of 86 in 2000.
