Inventor of WiFi technology

The Hollywood Actress Who Helped Invent WiFi

^“The human brain is more interesting than it seems,” Hollywood actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr said in 1990, 10 years before her death.

This prominent movie star may be best known for her roles in the 1940s Oscar-nominated films ‘Algiers’ and ‘Sampson and Delilah.’ But her technical mind is her greatest legacy, according to a documentary about her life called “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story”. The film documents a patent LaMarr filed regarding frequency hopping technology (converting frequency), which became the forerunner of secure Wi-fi, GPS, and Bluetooth now used by billions of people around the world. Of course, the story of LaMarr’s life is indeed remarkable. So who is Hedy Lamarr?

Humble and scandalous beginnings

Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria in 1914. Her father was a banker and a wardrobe inventor. As for Hedy, you could say her father instilled in her the idealistic desire to find out how things work.

As children, she and her father spent most of their time together trying to figure out the inner workings of machines. When he was 5 years old, Hedy disassembled a music box to see how it worked. However, Hedy is not a forever child. Her mother encouraged her to pursue art. As Hedy grows older, her beauty begins to take over her life.

At the age of 16, Hedy was discovered by Max Rinehart, a director. She moved to Berlin, where she became famous before the wars in Germany and Austria. She later married an arms dealer and also gained some knowledge of technological weapons; She has access to equipment that allows her to tinker in her spare time.

But that didn’t last long because she knew that she could not become an actress by marrying such a husband. Hedy often feels she’s just a trophy wife. “I am like a doll,” she said, “I am like a thing, some object of art that must be protected — and imprisoned — with no mind, no life of its own.” She ended up running away in the middle of the night on a bicycle in 1937 and she was injured in London.

She then immigrated to America in 1937 and caught the eye of film producer Louis B. Mayer while traveling by train from London to New York. She has gone on to make more than 25 films, have had the opportunity to appear opposite some of the most iconic leading men like Tinseltown, and socialize with the likes of US President John F. Kennedy and tycoon Howard Hughes – financier and inventor. Hughes even bought her scientific equipment that she can use in her movie trailer in whatever setting she’s filming in.

Filming by day, invention by night

Besides his acting career, Lamarr has spent time researching his inventions. Lamarr science writer and biographer Richard Rhodes writes: ‘She dedicated a room in her home, had a drafting desk installed with the right lighting and the right tools – there was a whole room. The wall in the room contains technical reference books. Here she creates a concept for an improved traffic light system and a pill that, when added to water, creates a cola-like carbonated drink. Although none of the ideas made it to market, other companies later had success with similar designs, such as Fizzies.”

All in all, during the early ’40s, Lamarr used to tinker with his own inventions and ideas for everything. But until she learned about how the Germans jammed torpedo radio frequencies.

Her most important and greatest invention came from her desire to help America win World War II. As a native of Israel, Lamarr always had a desire to help the Allied Forces defeat the Nazis, so she used all of her abilities and creativity to create devices that would help them. Allied army.

1940, and Lamarr was eager to contribute to the war effort. She knew that radio-guided torpedoes were a decisive weapon in naval warfare but also very susceptible to jamming – that is, intentional radio jamming.

At the time, one of the greatest difficulties facing the Allied Forces was that their torpedo guidance technology was easily thwarted by the Nazis. The Nazi army used submarines that were able to avoid Allied torpedoes by jamming the radio frequencies used for navigation. The most difficult part of the plan was that the switching between frequencies had to take place within a certain time, and synchronize with the radio transmitter to guide the torpedo, otherwise it would be damaged and the torpedo would go off course. direction immediately after being shot.

So, to overcome this problem, one of her friends was musician George Antheil, and together they came up with an idea that would make it difficult for the Germans to jam the torpedo’s radio signal. What Lamarr and Anthiel came up with is called frequency hopping (frequency conversion) technology – a method of continuously transforming frequencies that keep them from being disturbed by outside influences. The concept of their invention is not new. In fact, Nikola Tesla mentioned something similar in the 1900s.

With the help of composer and inventor George Antheil, Lamarr successfully overcame this challenge. Using their engineering prowess and Antheil’s mechanical skill, they created a device that works with the same mechanism as a pianola (a kind of self-playing piano) to keep the torpedo and the machine in check. On-board transmitters are synchronized in hops of the signal.

US Patent No. 2,292,387 was awarded to them in August 1942. It is listed under Hedy’s real name, Hedy Kiesler Markey. After receiving a patent in 1942, Hedy Lamarr donated the technology to the US military to help fight Nazi Germany, especially helping to guide torpedoes underwater without being detected. But it was disproved at the time, and the significance of the discovery was overshadowed until decades after it was used by the US Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

More importantly, this frequency conversion method also laid the groundwork for a wide range of radio communication technologies, forming the basis of modern wireless communication technology and enabling the explosion of smart phones. Smart and WiFi Connections that we still use today.

Currently, the frequency conversion method used for the familiar Bluetooth technology was also used in early Wi-Fi. Besides, this technology has also laid the foundation for the Global Positioning System (GPS) that we still regularly use on smartphones. That means that, without Lamarr’s creative mind, our world would not be what it is today.

An underrated genius

Although Hedy did not receive recognition for this invention until 1997, her contribution gradually gained more attention at a later time, as in the documentary “Bombshell” shown at the United States Tribeca Film Festival. Indeed, Hedy Lamarr’s inventions did not become more widely known until the late 1990s, shortly before her death in January 2000. And they were revealed in greater detail in the career newsletter. Her invention was published later that year.

Of course, Hedy LaMarr never received any money for his invention. And Richard Rhodes, who chronicled Lamarr’s biography in his 2011 book: “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Groundbreaking Inventions of Hedy Lamarr,” and Kruger tell the story of “the mother of Wi- Fi”.

Lamarr’s work is a case study of the harmonious convergence of art and science, he writes, and an homage to the diverse and adaptive brilliance of the human mind. She is an inspiration to those who pursue knowledge and achievement outside of their professional or academic fields.