A Hollywood star patented a secret radio system
In 1942 the film actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping system for guiding torpedoes. The Navy shelved it, but its principle lives on in modern wireless technology.
Hedy Lamarr was one of MGM’s biggest stars of the 1940s, often billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Away from the set, she liked inventing things.
The problem
Early in World War II, radio-guided torpedoes had a weakness: the enemy could jam the single frequency that controlled them. Lamarr realised that if the transmitter and the torpedo hopped between frequencies in a shared secret pattern, jamming would fail.
The piano connection
Her collaborator George Antheil, an avant-garde composer, had once synchronised several player pianos, which are driven by punched paper rolls. They proposed using a similar mechanism, miniaturised, to keep transmitter and receiver hopping in step.
US patent 2,292,387 was granted on 11 August 1942, under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey.
What happened next
The Navy rejected it as too bulky to fit in a torpedo. Operational systems using similar ideas appeared only in the 1960s, after the patent had expired, and Lamarr earned nothing from it.
Popular accounts sometimes say she “invented Wi-Fi” or “invented frequency hopping”. Neither is true: the concept existed earlier. Her patent was a clever, specific design. Recognition came late: the EFF Pioneer Award in 1997 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, after her death.
Bring it up
“One of the most famous film stars of the 1940s also held a patent for an anti-jamming radio system, co-invented with a composer.”
Follow the thread
- Same patternThe first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter Women in computing history whose technical work was long overshadowed by their public image.
- RelatedComputers began as looms Their synchronisation idea came from the player piano: another machine controlled by punched rolls.
- RelatedJulius Caesar’s secret code (and why it failed) Both are ways of hiding a signal from an enemy.
