Lamarr Hedy

Austrian-born American film actress and inventor once considered to be the most beautiful woman in motion pictures, whose film "Ecstasy" (1933), had been banned in the U.S. for a nude scene. In remarkable contrast to her on-screen image, she co-owned the patent together with composer George Antheil on which wireless data networking is based, after they conceived the idea of transmitting information in such a way that instead of being transmitted on a single frequency, it could be sent on several. Lamarr was born in 1913, 1914, or 1915 depending on which bio you can believe (1914 has been the year most astrologers use) to a comfortably-fixed Viennese family, an only child. Permitted to appear in a few plays by her disapproving parents, she always wanted to be an actress. At age 15, she ran away from school, went to the Sascha Film Studio and was hired as a script girl. A producer saw her, gave her a screen test, and after several insignificant parts she was given the lead in a movie that became known as "Ecstasy," which contained the famous scene in which she swam nude. She came to the U.S. in 1937, not speaking English, with a film debut the following year in "Algiers." Movies that followed included "Lady of the Tropics" (1939), "I Take This Woman" (1940), "Boom Town" (1940), "Comrade X" (1940), "Ziegfield Girl" (1941), "Come Live with Me" (1941), "Tortilla Flat" (1942), "White Cargo" (1942), "Crossroads" (1942), and "The Heavenly Body" (1944). Forming her own production company, Lamarr made two mediocre movies, "The Strange Woman" (1946), and "Dishonored Lady" (1947). Cecil B. DeMille cast her in the title role in "Sampson and Delilah" (1949), followed by "Copper Canyon" (1950), "My Favorite Spy" (1951), and an Italian flop, "The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships" (1954). She didnt appear in another production until 1957, "The Story of Mankind," which also flopped. Lamarrs connection with technology first surfaced in 1940. That summer, she and George Antheil, an internationally-famous musician, worked several months on the exact details of an invention that was loosely based on placing a synchronized player piano mechanism into a torpedo. Lamarr and Antheil dreamed up their frequency-hopping concept as a way to keep Nazi ships from jamming Allied torpedo signals. In December of 1940, they sent a description of their idea to the National Inventors Council. The invention caused some excitement, and there was an article about it on 1 October 1941 in the "New York Times." Patent number 2,292,387 for the "secret communication system" was granted on 11 August 1942 to Lamarr (filed using her married name, Hedy Keisler Markey) and George Antheil. It wasnt until 1957 that engineers at the Sylvania Electron Systems division used transistor electronics to accomplish the goal Lamarr and Antheil had in mind. In 1962, after their patent had expired, the concept of frequency hopping was used by the U.S. government in the communications system placed aboard ships sent out to blockade Cuba. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil earned a penny for their invention that is behind the latest in wireless Internet transmission, among other things. Lamarr was married six times. In 1933, she was placed into an arranged marriage with an Austrian armament manufacturer named Fritz Mandal, who was reputed to sell arms even in violation of the Versailles Treaty. She lived in the Salzburg Castle where the "Sound of Music" was filmed. They were married four years, when He Read less