Engineer, inventor and actress, whose discoveries allowed for the development of WIFI
She was considered one of the most beautiful actresses in the world and the inventor of the communications system called "wide spectrum transmission technique" on which all the wireless technologies available today are based. Actress, telecommunications engineer, and inventor whose glamour overshadowed her other facets.
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was the only daughter of a Banker from Lemberg and a pianist from Budapest who, although of Jewish origin, had grown up Catholic.
At school, she stood out for her intellectual brilliance being considered by her teachers to be gifted. At home, she grew up listening to her mother's performances on the piano, an instrument that she also played to a high standard from a young age. Complex and restless, she dropped out of engineering studies, determined to fulfill her dreams of being an actress.
The film that brought her to stardom in 1932, could not be more controversial. ‘Ecstasy’, filmed in Czechoslovakia under the direction of Gustav Machaty, was the first film to show the face of an actress, completely naked, during an orgasm. It was branded a sex scandal and was banned in movie theaters and widely censored and criticized, including from the Vatican.
Fritz Mandl, an arms tycoon, was enthralled by the beauty of the young woman and asked her father for permission to woo her. Her parents forced her to marry Firtz, condemning her to a stint in hell as he was extremely jealous and tried to get hold of all the copies of ‘Ecstasy’. She lived surrounded by luxury in the famous Salzburg Castle, but was a slave who could do nothing without Mandl's permission. Tired of the unbearable vacuum which her life had become, she resumed her engineering career. Continuous surveillance came to be so unbearable that she decided to flee. Eventually, she managed to reach London and embark on the ocean liner ‘Normandie’ bound for the United States. There she coincided with a very special traveler, film producer Louis B. Mayer who offered her work before even arriving at port, on the condition that her stage name be changed to ‘Hedy Lamarr’.
The system conceived by Hedy was based on an idea as simple as it was effective. It was about transmitting messages or command orders by fractionating them into small parts, each of which would be transmitted sequentially by changing frequency each time, following a pseudorandom pattern. Thus, the transmission times at each frequency were so short and spaced so irregularly that it was practically impossible to recompose the message if the channel change code was not known. She teamed up with an expert musician in instrument synchronization and created the patent.
On June 10th, 1941, they filed the patent application for "SECRET COMMUNICATION SYSTEM" on August 11th, 1942, when the United States was already at war with Japan and Germany. Hedy signed with her married surname, Markey, which she barely used for a couple of years. The U.S. military did not want to use Hedy's system. However, in 1957, engineers from the American company Silvania Electronics Systems Division developed the system patented by Hedy and George, which was adopted by the government for military transmissions three years after the patent expired. The first known application occurred during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962
Although the actress did not get a penny in from the patent, which expired unused, it cannot be disputed that she was the pioneer in this technique. Honors and recognition, as we shall see, took time to arrive.
She had six failed marriages that, along with the decline of her film career, led to massive pill consumption and a sick obsession with cosmetic surgery. She became a kleptomaniac and she was arrested on several occasions. Eventually, she retired to her Miami mansion to spend the last years of her life, isolated from a world that had marginalized her.
By the time she was recognized as an inventor, it was too late. Her bitterness had grown to the point that when she was informed that she had won the ‘Pioneer Award’ she remarked, "It's about time".
Sources:
https://mujeresconciencia.com/2015/11/30/hedy-lamarr-la-inventora/
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Sistema_de_comunicaciones_secreto
* El artículo Hedy Lamarr, la inventora se publicó en el blog Los Mundos de Brana de Laura Morrón el 4 de marzo de 2015.