Inventor => Frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication

Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born film star and inventor, co-developed a protocol for radio communication using frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication.

Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914 in Austria-Hungary. As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theater and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna.

After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial erotic romantic drama Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, and secretly moved to Paris. She was offered a film contract in Hollywood and Lamarr became a film star with her performance in the romantic drama Algiers (1938).

Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she invested her spare time, including on set between takes, in designing and drafting inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a flavored carbonated drink.

During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband, arms dealer Fritz Mandl, “possibly to improve his chances of making a sale”. She learned that navies needed “a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water.” Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo’s guidance system and set it off course.

Following this, together with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers. This approach, conceptualized as a “Secret Communication System,” was to provide secure, jam-resistant communication for weapon guidance by spreading the signal across multiple frequencies, a method now recognized as the foundation of spread spectrum technology.

However, the technology was used in operational systems only beginning in 1962, which was three years after the expiry of the Lamarr-Antheil patent. Frequency hopping became a foundational technology for spread spectrum communications. Its principles directly influenced the development of secure wireless networking, including Bluetooth and early versions of Wi-Fi, which use variants of spread spectrum to protect data from interception and interference.

Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 in 1953. In 1960, Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the “Oscars of inventing”. On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr.

She died in 2000 in Florida, US, at the age of 85.