Hedy Lamarr: Hollywood Beauty Who Revolutionized Warfare

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, but her real genius had nothing to do with the silver screen. This Austrian actress helped invent frequency-hopping radio technology, a brilliant wartime concept that would eventually influence military communications and the wireless world we take for granted today.

Hedy Lamarr and the Military Radio Secret Hiding in Plain Sight

When I flew combat helicopters for Uncle Sam we used something called SINCGARS radios. SINCGARS stands for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. I never understood exactly how that worked.

The avionics guys loaded secure fills into the thing before we took off on actual tactical missions. Thus configured, the SINCGARS radio hopped from one frequency to another along some predetermined sequence. Once synchronized between two stations, these radios worked fine. For an enemy trying to listen in, however, they were essentially uncrackable.

From Combat Helicopters to Hollywood: The Frequency-Hopping Connection

Back in the 1990’s, frequency-hopping radios seemed unimaginably advanced. To be honest, regular car radios have always seemed a bit mystifying to me. That you could now build a radio that would jump all over the electronic spectrum and still let two people talk over great distances seemed to flirt with magic.

This same technology is incorporated into GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi today. While frequency-hopping radios are pretty radical, what is even more extraordinary is the way they came about. The woman who originally developed this concept was also known for performing the first nude scene in a non-pornographic movie.

Hedy Lamarr: The Beautiful Mind Behind a Hollywood Legend

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in 1914 in Vienna. She was the only child of Emil and Gertrud Kiesler. Though Gertrud converted to Catholicism and raised her daughter as a Christian, both she and Emil had the misfortune of being born Jewish. This was a tough burden to bear in Austria in the 1930’s.

In addition to being just drop-dead gorgeous, young Hedwig had a simply brilliant mind. She won her first beauty contest at age twelve. She later said some of her fondest childhood memories were of long walks with her dad listening to him explain how complex devices worked. As soon as she was old enough, Hedwig began working in the theater.

Ecstasy, Scandal, and the Movie That Made Hedy Lamarr Infamous

While taking acting classes and still underage, Hedwig forged a note from her mother to land a job with a film company. She subsequently secured several roles as an extra in both feature films and stage productions. When she was just 18, a sketchy dude named Gustav Machaty cast her as the lead in an avant-garde art film titled Ecstasy. In it, Hedwig cavorted about naked through the woods and skinny-dipped in a lake. There was also a close-up of her face while she was supposed to be having sex.

Ecstasy was immediately banned in the more puritanical countries around the world. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini owned a copy that he said he would not sell at any price. Hedwig later said her key to success in the film was, “To stand there and look stupid.”

Beauty Was Only Skin Deep: Hedy Lamarr Had a Genius Mind

Naked people seem to litter the landscape nowadays. Sidney Sweeney and Emily Ratajkowski have built lyrically successful careers out of wandering about in front of a camera in nature’s own. However, back in 1933, nudity on the big screen was a big freaking deal. Hedwig became a notorious sensation around the globe almost overnight.

Let there be truth between us, the first thing normal people think of when they see some half-naked woman with her boobs squirting out all over the place is probably not, “Hey, I bet that young lady is a nuclear physicist in her day job.” However, in Hedwig’s case, that wasn’t far from the truth. She wasn’t a nuclear physicist, but she was nonetheless still just wicked smart.

Gaining an international reputation as the loose woman who is willing to take her clothes off in the movies did not do much for Hedwig’s self-esteem. After Ecstasy, she withdrew from film for a while and took mostly stage roles. However, she was still just crazy hot, so guys chased after her all the time. One of those was an Austrian arms merchant named Friedrich Mandl.

Hedy Lamarr, a Nazi Arms Merchant, and Dangerous Connections

This guy was friends with both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. He was also richer than Croesus. When they married, Mandl was 33, and Hedwig was 18. However, when Hedwig’s gunrunning husband saw Ecstasy, he was a bit put off that his hot young wife was doing the horizontal mambo with some other dude on the big screen. He kept her as a virtual prisoner in their castle home as a result.

Mandl hosted both Hitler and Mussolini as houseguests. When he held meetings with scientists working on military technology, Hedwig tagged along. Mandl later admitted that he hoped that including his smoking hot wife might help him close a sale. While there, however, Hedwig held her own with the eggheads as they discussed applied sciences.

Hedy Lamarr’s Great Escape from Austria to Hollywood

In 1937, Hedwig had had all of Friedrich she could stand, so she divorced him. To escape his castle fortress, she drugged her maid, disguised herself in the servant girl’s clothes, and hocked her jewelry to cover passage to London. Soon thereafter, she met Louis Mayer of MGM fame. Mayer knew a winner when he saw one and subsequently described Hedwig as the most beautiful woman in the world. He convinced her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr so as to get a little distance from that previous soft porn taint. Once he got the young woman to Hollywood, she took the place by storm. Her first seven movies were massive hits.

Lamarr’s Austrian accent was a far cry from that of the governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Where Arnold sounds like a death-dealing cyborg from the future, Hedy’s accent was actually quite lovely. This, combined with some decent acting chops and a face that men go to war over, made her a hot commodity in the pre-war Hollywood film scene.

World War II Changed Everything: Hedy Lamarr’s Secret Military Invention

While her on-screen persona was self-assured and sultry, Hedy was actually quite introverted and homesick up close. She would swim in her agent’s private pool but avoided public beaches and unnecessary exposure to her fans. Throughout it all, she was just burning up the big screen. Then her slimy ex-husband’s BFF Adolf Hitler tried to take over the entire freaking planet, and the world came unglued.

Hedy worked in film throughout the war. However, back during her meetings with those German military scientists, they had been scheming on a way to control a naval torpedo by radio. We use wires today, but radio control was cutting edge back in the 1930’s. Inspired by the mechanism behind a player piano, Lamarr collaborated with music composer George Antheil to develop a method for creating a frequency-hopping radio.

Inside Hedy Lamarr’s 1942 Patent: How Frequency Hopping Worked

Player pianos used long rolls of paper into which a precise series of holes was cut. By pumping a foot pedal, these automated pianos would feed the paper through and automatically strike the keys in accordance with the instructions on the roll. These instruments could produce surprisingly complex musical compositions as a result. Lamarr envisioned two radios that could operate like synchronized player pianos operating in perfect time with each other.

Lamarr patented the idea under her legal name of Hedy Kiesler Markey in August of 1942. The Navy rejected it outright, claiming the resulting device would be too large and cumbersome to fit into a torpedo. They helpfully suggested that Lamarr spend her time on something productive like selling war bonds.

Behind the Hollywood Glamour: Hedy Lamarr’s Turbulent Personal Life

Lamarr became a naturalized US citizen in 1953 at age 38. Soon thereafter, she designed and developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado. However, in many ways, being a polymath stuffed into a hot chick body was a proper curse.

I had to work hard to land my lovely wife. As a result, I have precious little experience with having people pursue me amorously. By contrast, Hedy Lamarr was a sex symbol pretty much from her childhood. That inevitably does something weird to a person.

Hedy was married six times and had three children. Despite a fabulously successful film career, she was first arrested for shoplifting in 1966. In 1991, she got nailed again in Orlando, Florida, after having stolen $21.48 worth of eye drops and laxatives. She pled no contest, and the charges were dropped on the assumption that she would mind her manners and not steal any more stuff.

The Dark Side of Fame: Hedy Lamarr’s Tragic Final Chapters

In the 1970’s, Lamarr passed on numerous film, TV, and advertising roles in favor of seclusion. She sued Warner Brothers in 1974 when she went to see the pioneering Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles and recognized her connection to the character Hedley Lamarr. Brooks, for his part, later said he was flattered.

Lamarr became estranged from her eldest son James when he was twelve. Tragically, the two did not speak again for half a century. She excluded him from her will that divided up her $3.3 million estate in 2000. He filed a lawsuit and ended up with $50k. I’m sure the lawyers all got rich. They always seem to.

Hedy Lamarr’s Legacy: From SINCGARS Radios to Wireless Technology

Lamarr’s pioneering work in the field of frequency-hopping radios had a much greater impact on the world than did her pioneering work in the field of naked people in the movies. She was honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award as well as the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. The latter has been described as the “Oscars of Inventing,” though I somehow doubt there are quite so many sequins involved.

Hedy Lamarr earned the Viktor Kaplan Medal from the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors in 1998. Two years later, she died alone at home at age 85 of heart disease. Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. As strange as it seems, this naked hot chick was indeed the one who first thought up frequency-hopping tactical radios.

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