022: The Problem Solver - Hedy Lamar

Intro
[Intro Tone]
So, the story begins like this.
There’s this legend – and it is almost certainly just legend despite featuring historical characters – that begins in the kingdom of Phrygia. The Phrygians were a collection of ethnically related people who migrated into Anatolia – or modern Turkey – about 3000 years ago. After a few centuries as an independent kingdom, it fell under the control of a series of empires, including the Cimmerians, the Medes, the Lydians, and the Greeks. Phrygians had many legends, including some that live to this day. Have you ever heard of King Midas whose touch turned everything to gold? Well, he’s a Phrygian legend possibly based on a real king.
However, that’s not the legend we want to use to launch our wider story. Not precisely, anyway. The one we care about goes like this. The Phrygians were without a king, which is a bad state of being for a kingdom sitting at the crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Western Asia. Every invading army marched through Phrygia on their way to wherever, so having a strong ruler was critical.
Fortunately, an oracle announced that he’d had a vision. As oracles are wont to do. He said that the next man to enter the capital city driving an ox-cart should be declared the new king. And so, the citizens of the city watched the gate to see who might arrive that met the qualifications.
Sure enough, a man soon drove an ox-cart into town. It turns out that he wasn’t some bold military hero or an enlightened scholar, but rather a peasant farmer called Gordias. However, the citizens did as the oracle declared and immediately elevated the surprised Gordias to the throne.
Out of gratitude, his son Midas (there he is!) dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios. Sabazios was one of the chief gods of the Phrygians, and the Greeks identified him with some combination of Zeus and Dionysus. Anyway, Midas tied the ox-cart to a post with an intricate knot. The knot was described as comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened".
The busy oracle then declared that any man who could unravel the elaborate knot was destined to become the ruler of all Asia. If this sounds a bit like King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, then that’s a good analogy. It is also evidence that people across the world come up with similar legends that are driven by the same underlying archetypical fantasies – in this case, that anyone can become king if he is special enough.
Anyway, many men tried to unravel the knot without success. Years passed, then decades, and then centuries, and the ox-cart remained tied to the post, the knot having resisted every attempt to untie it. And by the 4th century BCE, the cart still stood tied to the post at the palace of the former kings of Phrygia.
But then, a new guy arrived, full of determination and confidence. He was Greek – well Macedonian to be exact – and went by the name of Alexander. Others were already referring to him as Alexander the Great. By this time, Phrygia has been reduced to a province of the mighty Persian Empire.
Well, Alexander heard the legend, and since he was highly interested in ruling all of Asia, he decided to have a go at untying the so-called Gordian Knot. He studied the intricate weaving of the knot from all angles, but failed to find a way to unravel it. So, he sat back and reconsidered the problem. He reworked the puzzle. And he determined that the legend didn’t really specify how the knot was to be undone.
And so, he did one of two things. He either drew his sword and sliced through the knot with one stroke. Or, he pulled the linchpin from the pole to which the yoke was fastened, exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without having to cut through it.
Regardless, he had done it. And he went on to rule what the Greeks considered as Asia at the time. And then he died. Now, as I said earlier, this story is either completely legend, or at most, based on some sprinkling of truth. Despite its legendary aspect, the story persists to this day as a representation of a desired human behavior – to be able to solve an unsolvable problem through relentless analysis and thinking outside the box.
Hello! And welcome to another episode of Plot Twisted History, where we dive down historical rabbit holes in search of the stories with surprises and plot twists along the way. I’m your host, David Nix, a writer of historical fiction and an amateur public historian. Today we will meet a misunderstood girl who faced down one problem after another and, in the process, changed the world.
[Opening Music]
Act 1: That Face
In the city of Vienna in the year 1914 – just months after the outbreak of World War I – the Kiesler family welcomes a new daughter into the family, their only child. Her father, Emil Kiesler, is a successful banker originally from the Ukraine, which is at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The girl’s mother, Trude Lichtwitz Kiesler, is a concert pianist and a native of Budapest, the daughter of an upper-class Hungarian family.
The couple gives their new daughter the auspicious and oh-so-German name of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. And, oh, what a beautiful baby she is. From an early age, the young Kiesler girl has a face that no one can look past – like the face of an angel. Which brings us to a universal question: what makes a face beautiful?
The question may seem subjective. After all we can look at the faces of two people who look very different from each another in terms of facial features, but consider them both astonishingly beautiful. We can’t explain it. We just know it when we see it, even though we vary somewhat from person to person about what we consider to be a form of facial perfection.
Well, there has been a bit of science done to answer the question: what makes a face attractive. If you gather together people of all ethnicities and experiences and show them a set of photos, they will agree to a remarkable degree about which faces are the most attractive, even for faces far different from their own. Ask them why they find a face attractive, though, and the person will struggle to explain.
Well, studies have shown a couple of tantalizing data points about the why. First, most of us prefer symmetry – in almost everything, including faces. Most faces, however, have some slight asymmetry, usually only noticeable at a subconscious level. We find the most symmetrical faces the most attractive.
We also like “averageness”. Not “average” in the sense of mediocre, but “average” in terms of having facial features that lie well within the bounds of an averaging of everyone’s facial features. You know, the mean. A kind of Goldilocks zone facial feature arrangement.
Also, our brains do some kind of weird mental math about the proportions of a face. Here are a couple of noticeable data points. The distance between the centers of a person’s eyes often affects whether they are considered beautiful. People find faces most attractive when that distance is just under half of the width of the face.
Another subconsciously noticeable ratio is the distance between a person’s eyes and mouth. Faces with a distance of just over one-third the height of the face are considered the most attractive. Both those distances match the population average, or are very close to it – more evidence of the “averageness” quotient I already mentioned.
Well, whether you believe that beauty is purely subjective or that there is some kind of mental math going on at a subconscious level, there is no doubt to anyone that the young Kiesler possesses an astonishingly beautiful face. At the age of 12, for example, she wins a beauty contest in Vienna. And, as is the case with many who attract attention for their looks, Kiesler takes an interest in acting and is fascinated by theater and film.
However, she is also intelligent. Enormously intelligent. Her inquisitiveness becomes apparent at an early age, so her father begins having her privately tutored from the age of 4. By age 10, the girl is a proficient piano player and dancer and can speak four languages.
Kiesler’s father also begins to take a personal role in developing his daughter’s intellect. He and his girl routinely take long walks through the city, where he explains to her how things work. For example, he describes how street car motors operate, and how the infrastructure that feeds them electricity functions.
These conversations guide the girl’s thinking and open her curiosity further. At 5 years of age, she can be found repeatedly taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operates. How the spring drives the cylinder, causing individual tines to be struck in a certain sequence to produce beautiful music. She will never forget that music box – as we shall see.
Regardless, this is where we begin to see Kiesler as a problem solver, an out-of-the-box thinker, a relentless analyzer. Everything to her is a puzzle to be solved, and she attacks problem solving with abandon. However, her most difficult personal problem is also the most consistent: her beauty. Why is this a problem? Because no one can get past that face to the brain behind it. And many people want to own it.
And so, Kiesler decides to solve the problem – by using that face to her advantage. By using her beauty as a means to an end – a means to do as she wishes.
[Transition Music]
Act 2: The Entertainer
Kiesler is taking acting classes in Vienna at the age of 15 when, one day, she forges a note from her mother to excuse her from class. This gives her a day of absolute freedom. Rather than using this freedom to entertain herself, she leverages it to get a job as a script girl at a large Austrian film production company.
Well, it takes no time for the producers and directors to notice the astonishing beauty of this hired hand, so they cast her as an extra in the 1930 romantic comedy Money on the Street. This leads to a speaking part in the comedy Storm in a Water Glass the following year. Producer Max Reinhardt then casts her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which is performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt is so impressed with Kiesler that he brings her with him back to Berlin.
There, Kiesler meets the Russian theater producer Alexis Granowsky, who casts her in his film, The Trunks of Mr. O.F., starring the well-known actor Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moves to Paris, but Kiesler stays in Berlin and is given the lead role in the comedy film No Money Needed in 1932. This film makes her famous in Europe, where the audiences cannot get over “that face”.
Up to this point, Kiesler’s career is on a good trajectory, but limited to small European films – and she’s not yet even 18 years old. However, remember that she is an out-of-the-box thinker and sees her film career as a means to an end. And so, she makes a very out-of-the-box decision.
In early 1933, Kiesler is given the lead in the film Ecstasy, where she plays the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film becomes both celebrated and notorious for showing Kiesler’s face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief scenes of nudity. There is a scene in which she is totally alone, but the director edited the film to show it as a very hot sex scene, which it isn’t. Kiesler will later claim that she was "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses for the scenes. Was she duped, or was she playing three-dimensional chess? It’s hard to say, because when it comes to telling her own story, Kiesler is often an unreliable narrator. Nevertheless, the men behind the film are responsible for some predatory actions.
Regardless, the film has the affect for which she’d hoped. She becomes internationally famous. The film gains worldwide recognition after winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. Throughout Europe, it is regarded as an artistic work. However, as with any solution, there are often new problems. In America, the film is considered overly sexual and receives negative publicity, especially from women's groups. It is banned there, and also banned in Germany by the moralizing new political power – the Nazis.
So now, Kiesler now has a new problem. She is famous, yes, but also typecast as that girl. You know, the slut. New roles that don’t feature even more sensationalism are hard to come by. She thinks about the bigger picture of the problem and finds a solution – to completely abandon the cinema for the stage.
Why? Those who find her controversial film artistic tend to be the stage theater crowd. And so, Kiesler plays a number of stage roles, including starring in Sissy, a play about Austrian Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The play wins accolades from critics. Admirers send roses to her dressing room and try to get backstage to meet her. She sends most of them away, including a man who is more insistent than many others. His name is Friedrich Mandl, and he is absolutely obsessed with the young Kiesler. And he persists until Kiesler relents to see him.
Mandl, as it turns out, is an Austrian military arms dealer and munitions manufacturer who is the third-richest man in Austria. Kiesler falls for his charming and fascinating personality, though partly due to his immense financial wealth. Remember, a means to an end. Her parents, however, do not approve of Mandl due to his ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and, uh-oh, German Führer Adolf Hitler. However, they cannot stop their headstrong daughter. After all, she is in love with Mandl and he and his money appear to be the means by which she can do whatever she wishes.
On August the 10th, 1933, Kiesler marries Mandl. She is still only 18 years old; he is 33. Now, she is wealthy, the trophy wife of a powerful man, free to devote herself to intellectual pursuits. She will later say of her new wealth, “We had a country house with 25 guest rooms. And we went hunting. I had a Browning and I shot a stag into the neck 350 meters.”
Not a care in the world, or so it seems at first. Then, suddenly, Mandl changes. He has secretly resented his wife’s orgasm scene in the film Ecstasy, so he prevents her from pursuing her acting career – or any career, for that matter. He does not like the effect that his beautiful wife has on other men. He remains constantly jealous and paranoid, convinced she must be having an affair. He has the maids listen in on her phone calls, robbing her of even that privacy.
So, now, Kiesler has a new problem. She is a virtual prisoner in her castle home. She has everything she could ever want except the one thing she desires most – freedom. And she is becoming increasingly aware of the true nature of her husband’s business and political ties to the antisemitic leaders of Italy and Germany. And, as it turns out, both of her parents are of Jewish descent – as is she.
Despite his insecurity about having such a beautiful wife, Mandl makes a habit of showing her off by taking her to business meetings – a power move intended to cow others. At these meetings, Mandl confers with scientists and other professionals involved in the development and production of military technology. However, Mandl makes a fundamental mistake. Like so many others, he can’t look past Kiesler’s face to realize just how smart she is and just how much of the technical talk that she understands, absorbs, and ponders over.
As for her, Kiesler is in heaven at these meetings. In her life as constrained trophy wife, these discussions are an outlet for her remarkable brain and food for her soul. These conferences become her crash course in the field of applied science and nurtures her latent talent in the sciences.
However, these flashes of mental stimulation aren’t enough. Kiesler will later write: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. ... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. ... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.
A series of events makes Kiesler’s problem worse. First, her father dies rather unexpectedly, leaving her bereft of the one man who had always understood her intellectual gifts. Second, she gets on Adolf Hitler’s radar, who condemns her as immoral for her role in the Ecstasy film. However, that criticism is just a cover. What he really despises is her Jewishness. This from a guy who will go on in a few years to murder millions. Beware the chest-thumping moralists. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Kiesler’s marriage to Mandl eventually becomes unbearable and she decides to separate herself from both her husband and her country in 1937. Yet another problem to solve.
Kiesler prepares to leave by insinuating herself into the process of hiring staff, and then hires a maid who resembles her in build and hair color. One night, she persuades Mandl to let her wear all her jewelry to a dinner party at their home. At some point, she excuses herself. She meets with her look-alike maid and gives the woman tea drugged with sleeping powder. Once the maid falls asleep, Kiesler puts on the maid’s uniform, stuffs the jewelry in the lining of her coat, and escapes on a bicycle.
Now, there are contradictory stories about how it all happened, but I like this version the best. It reads like a spy novel. Regardless of the details, Kiesler manages to escape first to Paris and then to London. However, she has yet a new problem. Her access to wealth has vanished, and she needs to work to support herself. In London, she quickly finds a solution.
On the journey to England, Kiesler had learned that the head of MGM Studios in the United States, Louis B. Mayer, has come to London to recruit actors fleeing Europe. Kiesler manages to arrange a meeting with Mayer, despite only starting to learn the English language. Mayer takes the meeting, if for nothing else than Kiesler’s notoriety.
She impresses him enough that he offers her $125 per week, which is about $2500 per week in today’s money. That amounts to $130,000 per year, which is not bad for a destitute woman. However, Kiesler feels that she can do better, given what other actors are getting. So, she turns down the offer and leaves the meeting.
That’s it, right? She has blown her chance. Well, no. Remember that Kiesler likes to play three-dimensional chess. Mayer is heading back to the U.S. within two days, so Kiesler sells some jewelry and books passage on the same ship that will carry Mayer across the ocean – the SS Normandie. All she has left are a couple of pieces of jewelry and a few fancy dresses she took when she fled her marriage.
Once on board, Kiesler never leaves her cabin unless she is dressed to the nines and looking as glamorous as possible. Around the ship, she shmoozes with all the handsome young men, who fall all over her. On the second night out, Kiesler goes to her very modest cabin, pulls out her designer gown, and dons all her jewelry. She waits until the dining room is full – and that Mayer is present – and makes a dramatic entrance.
Everyone stops eating and gives an audible gasp. She strolls past Mayer's table, who is dining with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., perhaps the most famous actor in the world. And Fairbank’s eyes are glued to Kiesler, as are the eyes of everyone else, men and women alike. Right then and there, Mayer becomes determined to hire her. She ends up getting $500 dollars per week, or quadruple Mayer’s initial offer. It comes with a proviso – she’d need to learn how to speak English in six months.
Mayer has one other demand—she must change her name. Hedwig Kiesler is too German-sounding, and U.S.-German relations are on a down spiral. Mayer’s wife is a fan of 1920s actress Barbara La Marr who had died young, so Mayer decides that his new MGM actor will now be known as – Hedy Lamarr. He brings her to Hollywood in 1938 and begins promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman". And just about everyone who sees her agrees that he isn’t wrong.
Mayer loans Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who is making a film called Algiers. Lamarr is cast in the lead opposite the popular actor Charles Boyer. That film creates a "national sensation" in the U.S. She is billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which creates anticipation with audiences. According to one viewer, when her face first appears on the screen in a theater, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away." Overnight, a lot of actresses in Hollywood begin parting their hair down the middle, darkening it, and changing their makeup to emulate Hedy Lamarr.
However, this reaction from American audiences leads to a new problem. She quickly becomes typecast as “the face” – which leads her primarily to roles as a seductress of exotic origin. Dang! Typecast again!
To make matters worse, she is having a terrible time in her love life. She will later say of her love interests that “You never knew if they loved you or their fantasy of you. A man does not try to find out what is inside. He does not try to scratch the surface. If he did, he might find something much more beautiful than the shape of a nose or the color of an eye."
Forced into the roles she can obtain, Lamarr can’t be terribly choosy. Many of her films are poorly written, poorly directed, or poorly marketed. Finally, though, she has a couple of hit films in 1940 alongside superstar Clark Gable – Boom Town and Comrade X.
The next year, Lamarr is teamed with the uber-popular Jimmy Stewart in Come Live with Me, playing a Viennese refugee, and with him again in Ziegfeld Girl alongside Judy Garland and Lana Turner. These films are also successes.
After further successes in 1942, she plays the role of an Arab seductress in White Cargo alongside Walter Pidgeon. The film is a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasize her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines.
Although she is succeeding in film, the unfortunate lack of acting challenges bores Lamarr. And so, she returns to her first love – solving problems. And what better way to solve problems that by becoming – an inventor.
[Transition Music]
Act 3: The Inventor
Let’s set the context here for Hedy Lamarr, the former Hedwig Kiesler. She has no formal scientific training. She has taught herself most of what she knows about science from reading, sitting in on scientific conversations, and – by running practical experiments on her own.
When on a movie set, she has a habit of setting up a science lab in her private trailer or quarters and running experiments of all kinds. In fact, at one point, the famous Howard Hughes gives her enough equipment and materials so she could replicate his personal science lab. Among other things, she invents an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that dissolves in water to create a flavored carbonated drink.
During the meetings that she attended with her former husband – the arms dealer Mandl – she remembers learning that the German and Italian navies wanted a way to guide a torpedo as it races through the water. Radio control had been proposed. However, radio signals are incredibly simple to detect and jam. And so, the Nazis never pursued the idea further.
Just for context, this is how jamming works – and in the context of your real-world experience. Imagine you are standing on a street corner having a conversation with a friend. Then, down the street, you hear an emergency vehicle approaching with its siren blaring. As the vehicle comes nearer, you begin talking louder to be heard over the competing noise. Eventually, you can’t shout loud enough to be heard over the vehicle. If the vehicle then stops right next to you, you have no choice but to move away from it to continue your conversation. In effect, jamming is noise. And in the wireless world, it is actually called noise.
As another example, each radio station in the U.S. is allowed to transmit on a certain frequency and with a certain transmit power limit. This transmit power limit keeps the signal from travelling too terribly far, which allows another radio station some distance away to use the same frequency without the radio stations jamming each other. You may have had the experience when driving of coming to that no-man’s land between two such stations where from moment to moment you hear one, the other, or a garbling of both – which just produces noise.
Now, radio stations in Mexico are allowed to transmit with much higher power than they are in the U.S. Enterprising advertisers use this to their advantage by setting up radio stations on the Mexico side of the border that can transmit deep into the US. These so-called “border blasters” can act as jammers by overwhelming other radio stations on the same frequency – flooding them with noise.
Lamarr understands how jamming works, how easy it is to do, and how difficult it is to avoid it.
One day, however, Lamarr hears the news of a ship sunk by a German U-boat that kills 83 children. This distresses her greatly. She knows that U-boats are difficult to sink with torpedoes because they can move vertically and can speed up or slow down faster than a ship. Once a torpedo is launched from a ship toward a U-boat, the submarines can easily evade the torpedo. And as she had learned in her husband’s meetings, radio guided torpedoes – ones where an operator can steer it after launch – are no good. With a small bit of jamming equipment, a U-boat can render the radio signaling useless, and turn the smart torpedo back into a regular dumb torpedo.
Everybody accepts this as an unsolvable problem. But not Lamarr. She thinks about the problem, stews on it, and analyzes it. And she thinks about an interesting unrelated device she had seen recently. In 1939, the Philco Radio Company produced a new gadget called a “remote control” that could allow you to change stations on your radio from a distance. As I mentioned, each radio station transmits at a particular radio frequency, so the remote control actually changes radio frequencies of the radio.
We know this is one of the things that draws her attention, because she sketches diagrams of it in her engineering notebook. And with it, she has an idea. What if, when communicating with a torpedo in the water, you could just remotely dial up a new radio frequency with a remote control. This would cause the radio to move away from the jammed frequency. When the jammer moved to catch up with the radio, you simply moved it to another frequency.
What she thinks of, then, is what she calls “radio frequency hopping”. Hopping from one frequency to the next to avoid a jammer. She still needs a physical solution though. How do you ensure that the control radio on the ship and the one on the torpedo are hopping to new frequencies at the same time and in the same sequence?
Well, help on the practical side comes in the form of a man she meets at a party – Goerge Antheil. She and George hit it off on an intellectual level. He is a musician with a deep interest in electrical mechanics, and like Lamarr, he feels misunderstood. Antheil’s compositions are avante-garde, unusual, and even confrontational. Later musicians will be influenced by his work to create more modern music, but at the time, many find his music just too off-putting.
Anyway, Lamarr says, “we should talk”, so she writes her phone number on his car windshield with lipstick before leaving the party. Antheil follows up, and Lamarr describes her idea for avoiding radio jamming though frequency hopping. She outlines the challenge – of having two different radios hop frequencies at the same time and in the same order. And she describes her childhood music box – the one she had disassembled as a 5-year-old – and how the slow spin of the cylinder produced certain notes – or frequencies – in a certain order. Can her frequency hopping equipment work like that?
Well, it turns out, Antheil is uniquely qualified to answer the question. Fifteen years earlier, he had written a score for the film Ballet Mecanique that required the synchronization of multiple payer pianos. As you might know, player pianos work much like Lamarr’s music box. A cylinder rotates and causes notes to be played at certain times and in a certain order based on gaps in the paper wound around the cylinder. Anthiel created a way to get all of the pianos to start at the same time so that the music they produced would be synchronized.
Lamarr and Anthiel realize together that this starting mechanism can be used to synchronize a ship radio with a torpedo radio, whereupon the radios can hop frequencies at the same time and in the same order. And if the enemy determines what your hopping sequence is, well, you can just change the sequence – like changing the paper in a player piano.
And so, the two are off to the races. Lamarr’s relentless thinking is too intense for many who got close to her, and even pushes them away. Antheil notices this. In one of the letters, he writes, "All she wants to do is stay home and invent things. She is an incredible combination of childish ignorance and definite flashes of genius. She calls in the middle of the night because an idea hit her."
However, Antheil is not put off by this trait. He just leans into her genius and does the work. Together, he and Lamarr develop a prototype and make an initial submission to the U.S.’s National Inventor Council in December of 1940. This council of scientists and engineers effectively vets ideas and either discards them or promotes them. Well, they like this submission.
In early 1941, the council connects Antheil with a professor at Cal Tech to consult on the electrical system. Meanwhile, Lamarr hires a legal firm to draft a patent application. The patent is granted on August 11th, 1942, U.S. patent number 2,292,387. The U.S. patent database is free to access on-line, so you can actually go see the patent Lamarr and Anthiel submitted. She patents it under her legal name at the time – Hedy Kiesler Markey.
The invention is then pitched the to the U.S. Navy. However, the Navy rejects the idea, saying that the mechanism it too large to fit into a torpedo. With this rejection, Lamarr and Antheil decide not to pursue the idea further. Not that they can pursue it, because the Navy classifies Lamarr as an “enemy alien” because she is not yet a U.S. citizen and she is from Austria, which is part of the Nazi Third Reich. With this classification, they confiscate her patent. They tell her instead that she should use her celebrity to sell war bonds. In effect, they say, “Little lady, you’d be better off selling war bonds than inventing things.” And so, she does sell war bonds - $25 million worth. That’s about half a billion dollars in today’s money.
Now, even though the Navy rejects the torpedo frequency hopping mechanism, they clearly think the patent holds merit. They file it as Top Secret for potential future use.
After the war, Lamarr’s career became irregular. Despite a few more hits, she finds herself more firmly typecast as the seductress, the exotic beauty, the woman of few words and extensive body language. And, as I mentioned earlier, her relentless thinking puts some people off, creating a strange dichotomy. People desire to be near her because she is beautiful. However, her intellectual intensity is more than most people want, more than they can handle, and with some considering her a pest – so they slowly drift away from her.
Really, she should have been a full-time scientist, surrounded by people whose existence is dominated by the identification of puzzles and the relentless solving of them. But she happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, a fact that conspires to close door after door of devoting herself to scientific rigor – only for those who shut the door to eventually leave her behind anyway.
So, with the fading of her career, she has a new problem. Her inventions are getting her nowhere, but she needs to work. She solves the problem by becoming a producer of her own movies in an age where women do not produce films and actors do not produce films – and she is both.
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr forms a production company and makes a couple of films that, while critically well reviewed, don’t make a positive return on investment. She then goes to Italy to play multiple roles in the film Loves of Three Queens, which she also produces. However, she lacks the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and loses millions of dollars of her own money when she is unable to secure distribution of the picture. And so, in 1958, she abandons the film industry altogether.
With her film career behind her, Lamarr needs income. But where to get it? Well, remember her frequency hopping patent? The one the Navy confiscated and shelved? Lamarr learns that her patent has been used after all, and it had been used even before it expired. In 1955, the Navy had given the patent document to an engineer who was developing sonobuoys. Sonobuoys are floating buoys that use radio signals to detect enemy ships, but they are easily jammed. How to avoid jamming? Well, frequency hopping, of course. And who holds the patent for frequency hopping? Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil.
The sonobuoy engineer gives Lamarr full credit for the idea. However, the Navy does not pay her a cent for it. And she continues to not get paid for the work as her idea spreads into other military gear, like the first drones used during the Vietnam War.
Then her idea spills over from the military space into the commercial space. It finds its way into technology after technology under the name “spread spectrum”. I happen to know more than the average person about this subject, because my day job is an engineer who works on spread spectrum technology. You may not be familiar with the term spread spectrum. You are, however, familiar with the marketing names of the technology that uses it: WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular 3G, 4G, and 5G. All of these technologies use, as their basis, Hedy Lamarr’s frequency hopping idea.
Sadly, Lamarr’s patent never makes her any money. A travesty, really, considering the impact of her idea on today’s world. She is eventually inducted in the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, making her the only person who is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Toward the end of her life, Lamarr beomes reclusive, lonely, and forgotten by the world. She dies in Florida on January 19, 2000 at the age of 85. Since then, the proliferation of wireless technology has resurrected her stature – not as the most beautiful woman in the world, but as the inventor of an idea fundamental to the way all of us communicate today. I think she’d be tickled to know this.
So, what can we say about Hedwig Kiesler AKA Hedy Lamarr? For her entire life, few people could get past the astonishing glory of her perfect face. Because of that, her talent for solving problems went mostly unrewarded. Her face was like a border blaster, overwhelming everything else about her with such noise that her other qualities got jammed – and went virtually unnoticed.
We all have traits, qualities, and attributes that tend to outshine or even overwhelm our other traits. These can be positive, negative, or some of each. It is our tendency as humans to judge quickly based on these obvious traits and miss what lies beneath. Unfortunately, we live in an age of social media that rewards quick judgement and doesn’t often allow for a deeper dive. Our tendency to quick judgement and the reward for doing so is slowly driving us apart.
But what if we all decided to slow down a bit? What if we all decided to dive deeper into the understanding of one another? What if we decided to escape the noise – by changing the frequency?
And that, my friends, is the story.
[Transition Music]
Outro
[Closing Music Wrapper]
If you want to learn more, I recommend the 2017 documentary Bombshell because it includes a lot of audio from a lost interview with Lamarr where she talks in detail about her career as an actor and as an inventor. There are at least a dozen biographies of her life as well, and of course, you can watch many of her films on streaming services.
[Pause]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Plot Twisted History. I have been your host, David Nix. If you found this podcast interesting, you can help expand its reach by leaving a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. And please, recommend this podcast to others who might find it interesting.
[Pause]
And so, until we meet again, may your story hold surprises and your plots be slightly twisted.