Did you know Hedy Lamarr invented Bluetooth? Well, sort of. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (both registered trademarks) are an essential part of modern life.
You probably won’t have to look very hard to find someone making a call or watching a video on their phone through Wi-Fi and listening to it through their Bluetooth-connected ear buds. Both of these communication technologies are made possible by frequency hopping, a technique invented by Hollywood’s Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil.
Hedy and George first met at a small dinner party in 1940. Both were amateur inventors as well as being part of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Both wanted to do their part to aid the Allied forces in World War II. George had lost a brother early in the war. Hedy, who was a secular Jew, had fled an unhappy marriage in Austria to a wealthy munitions manufacturer.
Hedy knew about torpedoes from her marriage. George knew about remote control technology and spread spectrum technology from his avant-garde composing and work with player pianos. Working together they developed a way to guide torpedoes using radio signals the Germans could not jam or intercept because the signal was constantly hopping to a new frequency. The transmitter’s and receiver’s frequency hopping was synchronized by identical player piano rolls.
They presented their patent to the Navy in 1942, but the Navy decided not to develop the new technology. They did however label the patent “top secret” until the end of the war. The concept was used by Sylvania Electronic Systems in 1957 to create a system of secure communication with submarines. It was also used on U. S. ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis to prevent the Soviets from jamming their transmissions. Frequency hopping became the required standard for secure radio communication in the 1990s.
Even though their frequency hopping technique is now the basis for much of our communication, these multi-talented individuals never profited from their invention. By the time the technology was in use, their patent had expired. George passed away in 1959 and never saw how his patent eventually shaped the world. Hedy, however, lived until January 19, 2000.
Possibly because the patent was issued under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, rather than her stage name, no one connected the patent to the famous performer until she was in her 80s. She was awarded the Pioneer Award from the American Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 in recognition of her contribution to wireless communication. Both Hedy and George were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy or to stump your in-laws.
