Who is movie star Hedy Lamarr and what did she invent?

Hedy Lamarr is one of the leading actresses of the 1930s. Lamarr also took part in a nude scene in a movie (although the camera was about 500 meters away), breaking new ground in the performing arts with this move, which was quite absurd and obscene for its time.

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood's golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actresses of all time.

Hedy Lamarr, who married Fritz Mandl, a German arms dealer, in 1933, attended parties with German high society with her husband. During these parties, there were usually discussions about the latest military technologies and the most commonly used weapon, torpedoes. However, the biggest handicap of these torpedoes was their lack of guidance system. The best idea that came to mind was to tie the bomb to the ship until the moment of explosion. However, considering that the German navy had to be kept above water, this did not seem like a practical solution.

Listening to these conversations, Hedy intervened with a brilliant idea:

Why weren't radio signals used for this job?

But the idea was not very popular at the time, and experts argued that it could not be realized. The radio could not be used for this job because the possibility of the enemy discovering it and locating it posed a great threat. Actually, it could have been worse. What if the enemy decodes the signals and redirects the torpedo back to them? No, using radio waves wasn't that smart! Besides, what would a movie actress know about war technologies?

But Lamarr did not give up and continued her thesis. In response to these enumerated dangers, she suggested breaking up these messages into small pieces and sending them piecemeal over different frequencies. This way, the signals would reach the glove box, and once all the pieces had arrived, the message would be reassembled into one piece (an idea actually laying the foundations of today's web). The experts, who found this idea ridiculous, recommended that Hedy leave the thinking work to the engineers and generals and put the idea aside.

She escaped from her husband and the Nazis in 1937 and became one of the important actresses who came to Hollywood, and remarried in 1939.

In the meantime, Hedy hadn't put aside the idea of ​​a radio guidance system. Luckily, in 1942, as a result of her work with the American composer George Antheil, who shared the same enthusiasm with her, she became the owner of the patent called "Secret Communication System", registered with the American Trademark and Patent Office with the number 2,292,387. In this system, which is a primitive version of frequency hopping, the signals between the rolls used in self-playing pianos and 88 frequencies were ensured to follow each other.

This technology went unnoticed until the US military discovered its use in the late 1950s. By 1979, "spread spectrum technology" had become widely known, and by the 1980s and 90s it had begun to be used in wireless phones, remote controls, garage door controls, sophisticated military jammers, and cryptography technologies.

This idea was actually also the cornerstone of the internet and network technology: to take a signal or data and send it in small chunks and put them together at the other end.

As a result, GSM, Wi-Fi and GPS technologies, which are used by billions of people today, were invented by taking advantage of the foundation created by Lamarr and Antheil.

Unable to earn a penny from her invention that changed the fate of communication, Lamarr passed away in 2000 in her humble home in Florida.