Hedy Lamarr Biography • Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor. Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films, including Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer, I Take This Woman (1940) with Spencer Tracy, Comrade X (1940) with Clark Gable, Come Live With Me (1941) with James Stewart, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) with Robert Young, and Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud “Trude” Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). Her father was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director.

After an early and brief film career in Germany, which included a controversial love-making scene in the film Ecstasy (1933), she fled her husband and secretly moved to Paris. While there, she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where she became a film star from the late 1930s to the 1950s.

During her first marriage, Lamarr developed an interest in applied science and bored by her acting career, utilized this knowledge as an inventor. At the commencement of World War II, keen to aid the Allied war effort, she identified jamming of Allied radio communications by the Axis as a particular problem, and with composer George Antheil, developed spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat it.

Though the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of her work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to her being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. On November 9th, 2015, the search engine Google displayed a Doodle celebrating her 101st birthday, this doodle also included a small film clip about her life.