Hedy Lamarr's Birthday
Next: November 9, 2026
A screen star with an inventor's mind.
The story
Where it comes from
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna on 9 November 1914 and became a star of Hollywood's golden age, in films such as Ziegfeld Girl and Samson and Delilah. In 1940, with the composer George Antheil, she set out to stop enemies jamming radio-guided torpedoes. Their answer, frequency hopping, had the transmitter and receiver jump together between radio frequencies in a pattern only they knew. Patented in 1942 as a 'Secret Communication System', it is now recognised as an important development in wireless communications.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance. People can mark it by watching one of her films, or by reading her patent, which is freely available online. She was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, and Google marked what would have been her 101st birthday in 2015 with an animated Doodle.
Did you know
- The patent borrowed from the player piano: matching punched paper rolls at the transmitter and in the torpedo would switch between up to 88 frequencies, the number of keys on a piano.
- The US Navy did not adopt the idea, and the patent expired in 1959 without earning its inventors anything.
- When the Electronic Frontier Foundation honoured her work in 1997, Lamarr is said to have replied, 'It's about time.'
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