Hedy Lamarr is an Austrian-American actress, once dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world”, born in Austria in 1914 and came to Hollywood in 1937. She has starred in critically acclaimed films. price as high as Algiers (1938), The Strange Woman (1946) and Samson and Delilah (1949) and many other films during the “golden age of Hollywood”.
However, in addition to being an actress, Lamarr is also an inventor. Not fond of partying and socializing with the Hollywood elite, she often spends her nights tinkering, building, and testing new things in her own studio. Her inventions range from a tablet that can be dissolved in water to turn into a carbonated drink, to shape the wings of an airplane to save fuel, to improvements to traffic lights. pine.
Hedy Lamarr
Her most important invention, however, was one inspired by a desire to help America win a war. Lamarr was of Jewish descent, and she was appalled by the news received after World War II. She desperately wanted to help the Allied Forces defeat the Nazis, so this beauty focused all of her creativity and intellect on things that could give the Allies an advantage.
One of the biggest problems at the time was that the torpedo guidance technology was easily thwarted by the Nazis. At the time, German submarines were able to avoid torpedoes by jamming a single radio frequency they used for navigation. So, to overcome this problem, Lamarr came up with an ingenious solution: the frequency hopping method.
“She understands that the problem with radio signals is that they can get noisy. But if you could make the signal jump around randomly from one radio frequency to another, the person on the other end of the line trying to jam the signal wouldn’t know where it was.” , historian Richard Rhodes shared. “If the enemy tries to jam a particular frequency, it might hit that frequency on one of the hops, but they’ll only stay there for a fraction of a second.”
The tricky part, of course, was that the shifting frequencies had to happen in sync with the radio-guided radio transmitter for the torpedo, otherwise everything would go awry and the torpedo would deviate shortly after. when fired.
Lamarr overcame this challenge with the help of composer and inventor George Antheil. With Lamarr’s engineering prowess and Antheil’s mechanical skill, they built a device that worked like an auto-piano player, to keep the torpedoes and on-board transmitters in sync as they went. simultaneously jumps from one frequency to another. The duo later patented their invention in 1942.
Patent of frequency hopping system by Lamrr and Antheil.
Unfortunately, Lamarr’s invention was not used by the US Navy during World War II. But it was used for radio transmission during the subsequent 1962 missile crisis. More importantly, however, the frequency hopping method laid the groundwork for a wide range of radio communication technologies we use today.
Today, frequency hopping is used for Bluetooth technology and was also used in early forms of Wi-Fi. It even laid the foundation for the GPS system you use on your smartphone today. And the world wouldn’t be quite what it is now without Lamarr’s creative mind.
People still remember Lamarr as an actor rather than an inventor.
Unfortunately, not many people know about this beautiful actress’ contributions to modern technologies and her efforts to help the Allied Forces win the Second World War. Simply because she is mainly known as a Hollywood actress. She did not receive the recognition she deserved for her achievements while she was alive and has not even been properly recognized to this day.
Refer DigitalTrend