Information Pioneers - Hedy Lamarr Shooting Script

Published: July 2, 2010, 7 a.m.

Hollywood, 1940. Hedy Lamarr, known in Hollywood as 'the most beautiful woman in films' already had quite a reputation. The first woman to perform a nude scene in mainstream cinema, Hedy had fled Europe and a marriage to Mussolini's arms dealer to become box office gold, starring alongside Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey. But it wasn't the life she wanted. Knowing, from her marriage in Vienna, that military use of torpedos was being hampered by their single-frequency transmissions, Hedy, along with George Antheil, her piano-playing neighbour, set about creating a system called frequency hopping, in which parts of a signal were sent across different frequencies.