[0:01]August 1940.
[0:06]World War II rages on across the globe. In Los Angeles, Hedy Lamarr, an international superstar who was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, was sitting at a piano next to Hollywood composer George Antheil. But they weren't creating a score for a new film. They were creating something with the potential to change the course of the war and the future of the planet. The two of them were playing side by side on the piano, one kind of starting a musical score and the other kind of following, almost in an echoing pattern. This echoing pattern would ultimately inspire a technology that could protect allied communications from access interception, having the potential to change the trajectory of the war.
[1:00]This is The Lightbulb Moment, a Cheddar and Curiosity Stream original series. The Woman Who Laid The Groundwork for Wifi. Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria in 1914 into a Jewish family. Stories from her childhood suggest she had a knack for inventing from the start. At five years old, she took apart a music box that her father gave her and put it back together. As she got older, however, opportunities for her artistic skill set presented themselves more prominently. At 16, she was hired as a script girl for the production company Sasha Film. But it was hard to overlook Lamarr. Soon after being hired, she got a few small speaking parts in movies, which soon led to her first leading role in the 1932 German comedy film, No Money Needed. But the film that brought her the most fame, changing the course of her life forever, was Extase. It was sort of billed as an art film, but in fact, it was the very first non-pornographic all nude film in Europe at that time. And it it truly was not a pornographic movie, it was an art film, but at the same time, there had never been a fully unclohed actress appearing on screen. The world now had its eye on Hedy, and she knew she had to choose her next role wisely, as it was her only path to defining and refining her image to the world. With that, she decided that her next role would be in the stage play Sissi, which was going to run on the German equivalent of Broadway. She would portray Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And it's there on the stage that she really encountered the first primary force in her life and that was Fritz Mandl. Mandl was 13 years older than Lamarr at 33 and had already been married and divorced once. He also happened to be the third richest man in Austria at the time. He was the owner of this vast munitions manufacturing empire. To get an idea for just how powerful Mandl was, one journalist claimed, "It was said of him that he could break a Prime Minister faster than he could snap a toothpick in half." But to Hedy, Mandl was charming, at least at the start. Eight weeks after they met, the two were married. And at some point thereafter, he learned about Ecstasy. He was not only scandalized, but he absolutely did not want anyone else laying eyes on his now wife naked. According to TCM, Mandl spent 280,000 dollars, or if you account for inflation, 5 and a half million dollars, on suppressing the release of Extasy, trying to buy every single copy in existence. He wanted to control her kind of as a way of controlling his own world. Lamarr was forced into the role of a traditional housewife. That meant being the pleasant host to all of Mandl's friends and business partners who came to their house to talk shop. He did most of his business work really by entertaining people. He wasn't holding meetings with Mussolini's right-hand man at an office, he was having him come to their home and they were hosting a ball for him. So, I think that sort of aspect was really intoxicating to Hedy. She gained intel on the types of weapons that the Nazis had access to, like the radio-controlled glide bombs that became the predecessors to the smart bombs in use today. She also learned a great deal about the torpedoes the Nazis would one day use to sink ships traveling from Germany to the United States, including ships that carried Jewish refugees. Lamarr became increasingly frightened of the role her husband was playing in the war to come. After a few years of an increasingly toxic marriage, she began planning an escape from the hostile pre-war environment in Austria. She decided to play the long game. Don't forget she's an actress so she sort of plays the role of the docile wife for a stretch.
[5:05]And she painstakingly finds a maid that actually bears a striking resemblance to her.
[5:16]And then after a period of months, she's at a dinner party with Fritz and and a bunch of other people. She feigns illness, the personal made, of course, comes back to her chambers to help get her ready for bed. She slips sleeping tablets into the maid's drink. So the maid falls asleep.She takes her uniform and a small bag that she had packed. Of course, she couldn't like exactly leave with a suitcase but she had a bunch of jewels and some money, a small amount of clothes, and she escapes through the back of the house as if she were the maid leaving for the day. She took the maid's car, made her way to the train station and from the train station, made her way to Paris and from there to London. And once she was in London, she was really outside Fritz's reach at that point, you know, his power really didn't stretch that far. And she was able to escape from him. Hedy Lamarr landed in Hollywood in October of 1937, and immediately got to work on her first American film, Algiers. The 1938 movie was a smash hit.
[6:20]Once she came to this country, and all those things that she was concerned were going to happen started to come to pass. It started to really fuel in her this desire to do whatever she could to really strike out against the Nazis. One night, at a Hollywood dinner party, Lamarr met someone who could help. George Antheil, known as the Bad Boy of Music, was an avant-garde composer, most known for his passion project, the Ballet Mechanique, a composition in which he synchronized 12 player pianos to autonomously play a pre-planned symphony. But he was also at one point, a US munitions inspector as well as an author. Hedy invited him over for dinner. And I'm sure he was curious as to what it was about.
[7:06]And in many ways, he was a strange person to seek out for this, but during that dinner, she told him about this incredible access that she'd had to all this really inside information about the war. One consistent message was the power of radio and the role it would play in World War II weaponry and communications. Intercepted or jammed radio frequencies could wreak havoc on military maneuvers.
[7:34]The two aimed to find a solution to this weakness by creating an impenetrable frequency to be used in torpedoes. But taking that idea from paper to prototype was the real challenge. One stepping stone to getting there was looking back at Antheil's Ballet Mechanique and the way in which he had synchronized multiple player pianos autonomously. The key part of the symphony were these 16 player pianos which had to communicate with one another and play synchronously. The patent for frequency hopping was finally approved in 1942, just eight months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It couldn't have come at a better time for the allied forces. But the Navy cut wind of Lamarr's invention before the patent was issued. And they decided not to use it. It may just have been too expensive, too theoretical, too risky. I have to say, there will always be a part of me that will wonder whether the fact that Hedy was a woman and a famous, beautiful woman, might have affected the decision making. World War II ended three years later on September 2nd, 1945. Lamarr and Antheil's patent expired 16 years later in 1959. The technology they pioneered didn't fully get a chance to shine until the introduction of simple computing technology. Using a computer, you could generate a pseudo random number for jumping between frequencies, creating truly secret communications. Computers also increased the number of frequencies that information could be spread across. The technology is now referred to as frequency hopping spread spectrum or FHSS. It was deemed so necessary to future warfare that it was used in every ship involved in the Cuban missile crisis. FHSS continued to be adapted and used by the military in secret for the next 20 years, until it was declassified thanks to the FCC in 1985. From there, the technology developed by Miss Lamarr would be spun out into devices across industries. One of the most useful elements of the technology Lamarr pioneered was that it allowed multiple devices to be wirelessly tethered to one system without interfering with each other. Qualcomm used this advantage to adapt FHSS technology to create a cost-effective wireless communication network, or to put it more simply, the modern-day cell phone. FHSS is also used in every Bluetooth device. Spread spectrum frequency hopping is how your headphones can connect to just your device and stay connected without any interference from other Bluetooth devices around you. Even GPS has its roots in Lamarr's design. But of all these technologies, the one that's most attributed to Hedy Lamarr is wireless internet. In recent years, she has been dubbed the mother of Wi-Fi. Essentially, every piece of wireless technology in use today was made possible due to the breakthrough invention of frequency hopping by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. And yet, for decades, their names were absent from the records. But in 1997, 50 years after her invention, she and George Antheil posthumously received the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for her contributions in the field of spread spectrum technology. When we look back, you know, at Hedy's life and her invention, I, you know, I often like to invite people to wonder what if, like what if it had been possible for the Navy to try out that invention, making the Allies so much more successful at sea? When you really think about it in terms of number of lives saved, both on the battlefield and in the concentration camps, it's it's a real loss. Like, I mean, there's it's a very tangible impact on our world. Hedy's story, yes, on one hand, is the story of a of an incredible woman and this long legacy. But it's also a cautionary tale about the dangers and underestimating women. Hedy may only now be recognized for her work because of her prior fame and unparalleled beauty. While female inventors without the spotlight still have not gained the recognition they deserve. While so many women are responsible for changing the course of history, too often, these women are underestimated, undercompensated, and unrecognized. As we look back on Lamarr's impact on the world, it's important to also look forward at how the world will continue to change. Raising the question, what groundbreaking invention could arise if we stop overlooking the women who could revolutionize our world?
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