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Hedy Lamarr was considered for many years the most beautiful woman in the world, an actress who dazzled the public in the great productions of the "golden age" of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In the 30s and 40s he shared a poster with actors like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and Spencer Tracy and his face was the inspiration of Snow White and Catwoman.

But what few knew at the time was that Lamarr also had a prodigious mind for inventions and some of his discoveries have ended up being key pieces of technologies that we use today such as Bluetooth, WiFi or GPS.

Lamarr, born in Austria, was a self-taught inventor. He never had a formal education as an engineer and from a young age decided that his main career would be cinema. He attended classes at the Berlin academy of director Max Reinhardt and began acting with 16 years under his real name, Hedy Kiesler.

At 18 he had his first important role as the protagonist of the Czech film Ecstasy , a film with high erotic content in which the actress appeared completely naked. His first marriage temporarily moved her away from the screen. He married the Austrian weapons manufacturer Fritz Mandl, 30 years older than her and a supplier of weapons and ammunition to the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy.

Disenchanted by the excess control he exercised in his life - it was he who forced him to stop acting - and his friendships with Hitler and Mussolini, Kiesler decided to leave Mandl. She disguised herself as one of the domestic assistants to escape from her home and went to London to meet in person the American producer Louis B. Mayer, whom she convinced to give him a contract with the MGM. In U.S.A. He changed his last name to Lamarr in honor of silent film actress Barbara La Marr.

His first film in the US, Algiers was a great success and made Lamarr one of the best known stars and demands of Hollywood. In the following years he participated in several blockbusters such as Boom Town or The Lady of the Tropics .

The outbreak of the Second World War, however, revived his interest in engineering. Lamarr had an innate talent for mathematics and physics and enormous creativity to solve complex problems. It was she, for example, who gave Howard Hughes - a great friend and lover - the idea of ​​evolving the design of aircraft wings, adding curves and a more aerodynamic shape inspired by the body of fish and birds.

Lamarr worked on such disparate ideas as new traffic signals or pads to transform water into soft drinks, but his most important invention was a radio transmission system with frequency hops, designed to prevent the torpedo control signal from being possible. interfered

It occurred to him during a talk with his Hollywood neighbor, composer George Antheil, in the summer of 1940. The idea of ​​a communication through a constantly changing frequency synchronized between sender and receiver had passed through the minds of some inventors and Scientists in the past, like Nikola Tesla, but none had been able to create a device capable of making it a reality.

Uniting Antheil's experience in the use of synchronized pianos for his compositions and Lamarr's mathematical genius, both created a mechanism similar to the pianist rolls that synchronized the transmitter and receiver changes between 88 frequencies. They submitted their application to the patent office on June 10, 1941, and the patent was granted on August 11, 1942.

Lamarr gave the patent to the US Navy in the hope that it would be used to create torpedoes that the Germans would not be able to stop, but those responsible for the army concluded that the invention was too bulky to be practical.

Lamarr had anticipated his time. The discovery of the transistors in the late 1940s changed things and the updated device and in a more compact size was finally used in 1962 during the Missile Crisis in Cuba.

Lamarr's idea of ​​using ever-changing frequencies to avoid interference has ended up being a key piece of many of the radio technologies we use today, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections, which use this technique to avoid interference caused by other nearby devices. .

The role and importance of the actress as an inventor was finally recognized in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation but recognition came late. Although Lamarr died three years later, in 1997 she lived in her home in Florida and refused to attend the award ceremony, preferring to send a thank you recording.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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