The beauty of a woman has often in History reduced her to a merely decorative role. Hedy Lamarr was considered the most beautiful woman in the world, having inspired characters like Snow White and Catwoman, but she was far from just that. Her acting career began with a controversial role in the film Ecstasy (1932). It is the first time that a woman appears naked and simulates an orgasm on stage. “People never get past your face,” Hedy once said. However, her story shows that there is something much more beautiful when we scratch the surface.
At just 5 years old, Hedy disassembled and reassembled a music box to understand the mechanics of the object. She was very inspired by her father who often discussed with her how things worked.
With the death of her father, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Austria, where she lived with her husband, an authoritarian munitions manufacturer, she decides to flee to London. “He was an absolute monarch, and I was like a doll (...) without a life of my own.”
In London, she meets Louis B Mayer, founder of MGM. At this time, he offered small salaries to European actors knowing that they were fleeing the war and would accept any opportunity. She, however, refuses the $125 a week he offers, showing her courage and tenacity. Then, she buys a ticket for the ship Normandie, which would take Mayer back to NY. At a gala party on the ship, she makes herself seen and admired by everyone around her and ends up leaving with a contract worth $500 a week.
In NY, she then met the pilot and businessman, Howard Hughes, who, like her, had a great interest in innovation. At that time, even after a full day of recording, at night she was still working on inventions. Hughes then gives her a set of equipment that could be used inside the trailer, between recordings. With him, she went to aircraft factories and helped him create faster planes. She bought a book on fish and another on birds and looking at the fastest ones she developed a new wing design.
But it was in 1940 that she created one of her greatest inventions: a new communication system that alternated frequencies, and which would later be the basis of cell phones, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and war technologies. Together with George Antheil, an experimental composer, they began to tinker with ideas to combat the Axis powers. “Inventions are very easy for me,” she said. The idea was to tune the radio frequency of the ship and the torpedo, which jumped in frequency, making it impossible to intercept.
However, the Navy refused to implement the patent in 1941. Imagine if they would accept the invention of a woman, and a famous one... She then used her fame to support the Allies in another way.
There is, however, evidence that indicates that her patent was used by the Navy years later, in 1959, before its expiration. However, she never received any value for it. It is estimated that the market value of her invention is estimated at $30 billion.
It was only in the 90s that the media began to tell about her inventions, rescuing her true story. In 1997, she and Antheil were awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award.
Before dying, in the year 2000, she states and teaches us: “what you spent years building can be destroyed overnight. Build it anyway.”
