Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (and secure Bluetooth and wi-fi)

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“Any girl can be glamorous,” she famously said of her screen career. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Film tells how Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr helped to invent wifi
Hedy Lamarr starred in biblical blockbusters

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/12/hedy-lamarr-film-documentary-wifi-bluetooth-susan-sarandon

From a much longer article:

Her interest in radio communications seems to have been rekindled by the introduction in America of remote control systems for playing music, and by her concern about the German jamming techniques that prevented the use of radio-controlled torpedoes.

She worked on her invention of an early form of “spread spectrum” telecommunications – in which a signal is transmitted on a much broader bandwidth than the original – together with her Hollywood neighbour, the avantgarde composer George Antheil, through the summer of 1940.

Their joint design employed a mechanism rather like the rolls used inside a pianola, or self-playing piano, to synchronise changes between 88 frequencies – the standard number of piano keys. The duo submitted a patent to the National Inventors Council on 10 June 1941, and it was granted a year later.

While the idea was not entirely new, with German engineers winning patents for related work in 1939 and 1940, the United States navy classified the patent as “top secret”. It took time, however, for the military to recognise how useful Lamarr and Antheil’s bulky invention might become.

After the war, in 1957, engineers at Sylvania Electronic Systems Division adopted it, and the navy began to use it to help transmit the underwater positions of enemy submarines revealed by sonar.

In 1998, more than 50 years after their invention, the pair were honoured with an Electronic Frontier Foundation award.

The actress, who once commented that her face was her “misfortune” and “a mask I cannot remove”, may now gain some posthumous recognition as an inventor, but her most lasting legacy is still likely to be the striking features of Disney’s Snow White, a cartoon character modelled on Lamarr.

She gets a good deal of the credit for the creation of “frequency hopping”.

The film Bombshell, about her life, premieres next week, and will shortly open in theaters in NY and possibly LA. Let’s hope it gets a much wider release soon.

According to some reports, a miniseries about her life and inventive work is also in development.