Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr (/ˈhɛdi/; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor. After an early and brief film career in Germany that included the controversial film Ecstasy (1933 – in which Lamarr is very briefly seen swimming in the nude and running naked), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. There, she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where she became a film star from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films, including Algiers (1938), I Take This Woman (1940), Comrade X (1940), Come Live With Me (1941), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and Samson and Delilah (1949). At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. 2Early life and European film career Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894 – 1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880 – 1935). Her father was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director. Her mother was a pianist and Budapest native who came from an upper-class Jewish family; she had converted from Judaism to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian", who raised her daughter as a Christia