Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr lived two careers that her own era refused to hold together. As a Hollywood film actress from the late 1930s through the 1950s, marketed by MGM as the most beautiful woman in film, she starred in major studio pictures including Algiers and Samson and Delilah. At the same time, self-taught and without formal engineering training, she worked with the avant-garde composer George Antheil on a radio guidance system for torpedoes that would hop pseudorandomly across many frequencies in a pattern synchronized at transmitter and receiver, making the signal far harder for an enemy to jam or intercept than a fixed-frequency signal. The two patented the frequency-hopping spread spectrum system in 1942 and offered it to the United States Navy, which set the idea aside at the time and did not deploy a version of it until the 1960s. The same spread-spectrum principle later became foundational to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS technology, and Lamarr, largely unrecognized as an inventor during her working life, received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. This atlas states her dual life plainly: the film career that made her famous and the engineering contribution that her own century mostly declined to see.