Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. She was known to be the inspiration for Snow White and Catwoman. Inventing was a second life for her, and she wasn’t known for it until mainly after her passing when there was a more prominent use for her innovation through wireless communication. She was a Jewish child born during the shadow of the First World War. During her challenging childhood, she resorted to acting and was the Angelina Jolie of her time. She went to some of Austria's most famous and well-off academies yet dropped out of her schooling at age 15 to pursue acting. She was an actress during Hollywood's golden age; Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actresses of all time.

Lamarr was not only interested in the humanities but wanted to know how everything worked and commonly took things apart to reverse engineer them. Inventing was a hobby to Lamarr; she loved it almost as much as acting. She had no training in chemistry or engineering, but she was gifted in the world of Science. It is unknown how many inventions she made, but a few consisted of small cubes of condensed soda for people during the war that they would drop into the water and aid in the making of more advanced planes. During her time inventing, she made a solution to one of the biggest problems of Nazi U-boats interfering with American signals by jamming them. Her solution was to make the frequencies hop because there was no way for them to jam it anymore, and if they did, it would only ruin a few seconds. Her frequency hopping idea is used in so much technology now! While she was one of the best actresses of her time, this woman also was the pioneer of the inventions that later were used to make WiFi!! Yes, as crazy as it seems, the girl given the nickname “most beautiful girl in the world” is the same girl who pioneered the first working WiFi prototypes.

Lamarr was praised by humanity for not only her looks but also her brain, but it took her countless years to prove this to the world. Without Lamarr, there will be no wireless communication in our modern world! When she made this invention, the Navy put it off, claiming it wasn’t necessary; however when wireless communication became more widespread, her credit was given. While Lamarr was never given rights to her inventions, they are now estimated to be worth around 30 billion dollars.