Information Pioneers Hedy Lamarr

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. The system was based on the piano rolls that Antheil used in his player pianos, and allowed torpedos to be controlled without being intercepted. The patent she held is the basis for the wi-fi, GPS and mobile communications we use today.