Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna. Her first marriage in 1933 was to Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer who sold munitions to Mussolini and was a regular host at his Salzburg estate to senior German and Italian military officers discussing weapons specifications over dinner. Lamarr listened. She fled the marriage in 1937, reached London, and was signed by MGM the same year on a contract that paid her $3,000 per week.
She arrived in Hollywood with a working understanding of guided-munitions engineering — the by-product of three years of Mandl dinner parties — and a notebook full of ideas.
The patent
In summer 1940 Lamarr met the avant-garde composer George Antheil at a Hollywood party. Antheil had spent the 1920s in Paris writing the Ballet Mécanique, a piece scored for sixteen synchronised player pianos. Synchronising sixteen player pianos in 1924 had required him to develop a method of automatic mechanical timing. Lamarr proposed that the same method could synchronise a transmitter and receiver as they switched together through a sequence of radio frequencies — making the signal impossible to jam, because at any given instant the jammer would not know which frequency to block.
The pair filed US Patent 2,292,387 on 10 June 1941. It was granted on 11 August 1942 under Lamarr’s married name, Markey, and Antheil’s name. They donated it to the US Navy.
What the Navy did
Nothing. The patent was filed away. The Navy’s stated reason was that the synchronisation mechanism (a player-piano roll with 88 frequencies) was mechanically too complex for shipboard use. The actual reason appears to have been institutional reluctance to act on a patent from a film actress and a composer with no military credentials. The patent expired in 1959 without any use.
The principle — frequency-hopping spread spectrum — was independently rediscovered by Sylvania Electronic Systems engineers in the early 1960s and used in US Navy secure-communication systems from 1962 onwards. The 1962 implementation was electronic rather than mechanical, but the underlying mathematics was identical to Lamarr and Antheil’s 1942 patent.
Frequency-hopping is the foundation of modern Bluetooth (which hops 1,600 times per second), GPS military signals, and the original Wi-Fi 802.11 specification.
What happened to them
Antheil died of a heart attack in New York in February 1959, aged 58, six months before the patent expired.
Lamarr received no money from the patent. She received public recognition in 1997 (the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award) and posthumous induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She died in Florida in January 2000, aged 85. Her ashes were scattered in the Vienna Woods.