Person People · 1 min
Hedy Lamarr
A film star who co-invented a way to keep radio signals from being jammed, decades before the world caught up with the idea.
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Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood's best-known actors in the 1940s. She was also an inventor. In 1942, with the composer George Antheil, she received a US patent for a "secret communication system": a way to steer radio-guided torpedoes that hopped between frequencies in a pattern only the sender and receiver knew, so an enemy could not jam the signal.
The idea borrowed from Antheil's work synchronising player pianos. The US Navy did not adopt it during the war. Versions of frequency hopping were used by the military from the 1950s and 1960s, and spread-spectrum methods descended from the same family of ideas now sit inside Bluetooth and some forms of Wi-Fi.
Recognition came late. Lamarr and Antheil received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997, and Lamarr was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, after her death.
Why she is in Learn
Radio is not only stations. It is the invisible engineering that lets millions of signals share the same air without drowning each other out, and some of that engineering came from people nobody expected to find in a patent office.