#(wifi

[animentality]

[grickle14]

Unbelievable.

[shortbreadhorizons]

[x-siren-song-x]

the woman who invented your wifi — and was told to just look pretty

let me tell you about hedy lamarr, because the world remembers her face and forgot everything else.

lamarr was born hedwig kiesler in vienna in 1914. by her early twenties she had moved to hollywood and become one of the biggest stars of the golden age of cinema. studios called her "the most beautiful woman in film," and that was the only identity anyone ever gave her. but behind the glamour, lamarr was an inventor with a restless, brilliant mind.

during world war ii, she learned that allied torpedoes were failing because the enemy could intercept and jam the radio signals used to guide them. rather than simply reading about the problem and moving on, she decided to solve it. she partnered with george antheil, a composer and pianist, and together they developed a concept called frequency-hopping spread spectrum. the idea was that a radio signal would rapidly jump between different frequencies, making it nearly impossible to jam. lamarr drew inspiration from an unexpected place — the synchronised rolls of a player piano. she and antheil patented the technology in 1942 and offered it to the united states navy free of charge.

the navy rejected it. lamarr was an actress, and the military did not take her seriously. they told her she would be more helpful selling war bonds, which she did, raising millions. her invention was filed away and forgotten.

but the idea was ahead of its time, not wrong. decades later, the military began quietly using frequency-hopping technology. it went on to become a foundational concept behind modern wifi, bluetooth, and gps — technologies that billions of people use every single day.

lamarr received no recognition for her contribution until 1997, when she was 83 years old. she was awarded the electronic frontier foundation pioneer award, and reportedly responded with "it's about time." she died three years later in 2000, and most of her obituaries still led with her beauty rather than her brilliance.

her story raises a question worth sitting with. how many ideas have been dismissed because the person behind them did not look like what the world expected an inventor to look like. how much have we lost because brilliance was mistaken for something less, simply because it came in an unexpected form.

remember hedy lamarr. not for her face, but for the fact that the device you are reading this on works in part because of her.

[sparklejamesysparkle]

Hedy Lamarr, her second husband, producer and screenwriter Gene Markey (second photo, far left), and actor Frank Morgan (best remembered as the Wizard in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz) at a picnic gathering on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California hosted by director John Ford and his wife, Mary McBride Smith, photos by Alexander Paal, 1939.

[unbfacts]

[2000ghosts]

july 14, 2006