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Hedy Lamarr--actress/radio inventor [telecom]

Actress Hedy Lamarr is credited with inventing key concepts used in radio and telephony to this day. Her biography, by noted author Richard Rhodes, has been published.

book review from Newsweek:

"Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy Lamarr achieved in that realm revealed in Richard Rhodes's fascinating biography, Hedy's Folly it's a pity more of them don't consider it. In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What moved her to do this? "She didn't drink and she didn't like to party, so she took up inventing", Rhodes explains. Of course, there was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet's only invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of water into soda."

For full article please see:

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Reply to
HAncock4
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Indeed, Heddy Lamarr was responsible for the first use of the technology known as CDMA which is one of two major mobile telephone technologies.

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Reply to
Joseph Singer

I'm sorry, I can't see that name without having immediate flashbacks to "Blazing Saddles".

Someone has to end this thread before I get the DVD off the shelf.....

Reply to
David Clayton

ISTR that, back when WiLAN actually produced equipment,* their web site detailed Ms. Lamarr's inventiveness and how much modern wireless communication owed her. I just took a quick look at their web site but it seems she is now mentioned only in one news item from 2000.

  • I used a pair of their fixed wireless Ethernet bridges a little over a decade ago when a company filled its main office space and expanded into a building down the road but the local ILEC indicated that they did not have capacity to provision a data circuit between the two. They were a good solution for the time, but WiLAN seems to be out of the equipment business these days and in the business of acquiring and licensing patents.
Reply to
Geoffrey Welsh

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