According to a Chinese proverb, “A curious woman is capable of turning around the rainbow just to see what is on the other side.” This is not far from the truth; curiosity has made women stand out, invent things that seem pretty impossible, come up with brilliant ideas that have contributed greatly to society, and much more.
For Hedy Lamarr, whose real name is Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, curiosity and her love for technology and science led her to come up with the creative invention of “Frequency hopping” This technology would later be used to create WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems.
Born in Vienna, Austria, on November 9, 1914, Lamarr who was fascinated by theatre and film, grew up to become an award-winning and successful actress, but there was more to her than just acting. Although she had no formal training, she spared time to feed her curiosity, which led her to design and invent improved traffic stop lights and a tablet that, when dissolved in water, created a flavoured carbonated drink similar to Coca-Cola.
While still married to her controlling husband, whom she eventually fled from, she followed him to his meeting, where she learnt that navies needed a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through water. This was to maintain communication security and avoid interception from the enemy. Lamarr came up with an idea to prevent the jamming by frequency hopping and discussed this with her friend George Antheil, a pianist and composer.
According to Richard Rhodes, a journalist who set out to rewrite America’s memory of Lamarr, he said Lamarr was inspired by the war and felt the need to invent something to help the Allied cause. In his words, “She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed. But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is. If they try to jam one particular Frequency, it might hit that Frequency on one of its hops, but it would only be there for a fraction of a second.”
Although her invention of Frequency hopping and its impact weren’t understood until decades later, they became the basis for the wireless communication we all know today.
In 1997, Lamarr and her friend George Antheil who worked hand in hand with her in inventing the hopping frequency were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. She also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the “Oscars of inventing”, an award that was given to creative people whose lifetime achievements contributed to society.
Not only this, she was named after a Quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which the IQOQI installed in 2013; she was also posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology in 2014.
Another notable award was in November 2015, when Google honoured her with a doodle on the 101st anniversary of her birth.
Lamarr was a woman who succeeded at anything she put her mind to.