Giving Thanks for WiFi and the Woman Who Made It

What a time to be alive, right? 

The last time this planet saw as many widespread travel bans was during the 1940s - and in the 80 years since, the way we share and access information has exploded in ways folks back then could have hardly imagined. Except there WAS somebody imagining the potential, and that somebody was Hedy Lamarr, who looked like this:

Wait what

That’s not the nerd you were maybe thinking of, right? So what I’m doing here is working the topic of WiFi into this conversation, without which we wouldn’t be able to work remotely as most of us currently are, to say nothing of being able to stream effectively any media we choose to see. I don’t need to tell you how amazing this is and how quickly we take it for granted - but it is worth casting our minds back to 1942, when Hedy Lamarr filed a patent for a frequency-hopping signal system, which today is the basis for the spread-spectrum techniques used in modern WiFi. Lamar wasn’t actually thinking about the potential global reach of cat pictures - she was actually thinking about the US Navy and, uh, World War II. She’d heard that the Navy was using new radio-controlled torpedoes, but it turned out to be incredibly easy to jam radio frequencies and set them off course. So, Lamarr, who was, in the words of her friend, pianist and composter George Antheil, ”not feeling very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about munitions and various secret weapons ... and that she was thinking seriously of quitting MGM and going to Washington, DC, to offer her services to the newly established National Inventors Council.”

Did I mention Lamarr was an actress? Yeah, no, if that first image didn’t look like the person who you thought invented WiFi, don’t worry: by 1942 Lamarr had starred in some 14 films. Notable among them were Lady of the Tropics (1939), co-starring Robert Taylor; Boom Town (1940), with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy; and Tortilla Flat (1942), also co-starring Tracy. See, Lamar appeared in newspapers and magazines with headings that often described her as “the most gorgeous and exotic of Hollywood's leading ladies” - but aside from that, she had a casual penchant for inventing things as inspiration struck her. 

Wait, who exactly the hell are we talking about here? 

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. As a teenager she was “discovered” by an Austrian film director, gained international notice in 1933, with her role in the sexually charged Czech film Ecstasy. She was briefly and unhappily married to an Austrian munitions manufacturer who literally sold arms to the Nazis, and after her divorce she fled to the United States and signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood under the name Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film, Algiers, Lamarr started attracting headlines.

If acting was effortless for Lamarr, inventing things, in her words, wast just as breezy: 

“Inventions are easy for me to do,’ she says in the 2017 biographic documentary Bombshell. “I don’t have to work on ideas, they come naturally.”

From Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017)

Lamarr had no formal training and was completely self-taught, but her spare time was casually dedicated to hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight, and helping aviation tycoon Howard Hughes (heard of him?) change the square design of his aeroplanes to a more streamlined shape to make them go faster. Hedy Lamarr told Howard Hughes how to make his planes go faster, you guys.

So now we’re back to 1942, and Hedy Lamarr wants to help the US get a competitive edge in winning the War. With her patent filed, Lamarr has basically just invented WiFi. Unfortunately: at the time, it was technologically difficult to implement. Nor was the Navy interested in the ideas of people outside of the military - so her idea did nothing for World War II. However, by the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, a version of her design was installed on US Navy ships - five years after her patent expired. Womp-womp. Lamarr never saw a blue cent for her invention, which was would eventually be refined into modern Bluetooth technology and WiFi - although in 1997, she and George Anthiel were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award. And later in the same year, Lamarr became the first female recipient of the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, a prestigious lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors that is dubbed "The Oscar of Inventing”. 

Lamarr died in 2000. In the last decades of her life, Lamarr communicated only by telephone with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. (She would have done great in current times). Two documentary biopics have been made of her - Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca; and  Alexandra Dean’s aforementioned documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story which premiered in 2017. 

So, if you’re feeling cooped up in self-quarantine right now, try to think about where the roots of your bountiful WiFi grew from, how little thanks the creator got for it, and what a grave mistake we all make from judging people by their appearances.