When the Nazis took over, the “mother” of wireless internet escaped and became famous in Hollywood. The actress and inventor made the technology that made wireless communication devices possible.

People today use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi a lot because a Jewish woman who fled persecution in her home country came to the United States and found a new home. At the start of the last century, Hedy Lamarr, a well-known actress, died in 2000 when she was 85. She was also an inventor, and she died at that age. It came up with the frequency hopping system, which was meant to help submarine torpedoes follow radio signals.

This system is the foundation for the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), which is used in many wireless devices. The radio signal “jumps” from one channel to another randomly, but it doesn’t break the link. Thus, the signal is less likely to be interfered with or crowded, making it more difficult to intercept.

Birthplace and family

In 1914, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Austria. She was already interested in machines and inventions when she was a little girl. But, because her mother was a pianist, she went into the art world when she was young. Her first movie came out in 1930 when she was 16.

The same year, Hedy married one of the richest men in Austria. Mandl owned an armaments factory and had ties to the Nazi government, which had just come to power, so he knew about it. In her words, his wife, Hedy, didn’t do anything and lived as if she were a prisoner at home.

She left Austria for London in 1937 because she was unhappy with her marriage and the country’s future. As a film actor, she flew to the United States, where she kept up her work. When she was in Hollywood, she used the stage name Hedy Lamarr in honor of the actress Barbara La Marr, who died a few years ago. In a short time, she starred with big names of the time, like Clark Gable and Judy Garland. Years later, she would get a star on the Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.

Despite how well she did on the big screen, the war still bothered her, especially since her mother was still in Austria. Because Lamarr was married to Mandl, she had a lot of knowledge about weapons. She also had a lot of knowledge about art because she was married to him.

Source – Web Resources Ideas

Hedy Lamarr and her ideas

At a party in 1940, she met the composer George Antheil, who was also a friend. People say that while they were playing some songs on the piano, Lamarr was inspired by how the technology worked. During the time that “transmitter” Antheil played the first chords, the “receiver” did the same thing soon after,

To stop the attacks, the German navy caused a lot of people to use the same frequency that submarines used to communicate, which caused them to lose contact.

If they used this technology, the Allied forces would be at a huge advantage.

Because Lamarr was a well-known young woman, the US high command didn’t pay attention to her ideas. It was also too complicated for the time. The technology needed to make it work is too advanced for the time. When the patent ran out, Lamarr didn’t make any money from it.

The military used the system, but the technology opened up many possibilities for people who didn’t work for the military. GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi were all made possible by the technology.

In the meantime, Hedy Lamarr stopped acting in the 1960s and went into seclusion for a while in the following decades. Neither her children nor she met. They were given the EFF Pioneer Award, known as the Oscar of Invention in the United States. The next year, the Austrian government gave her the Viktor Kaplan award for her work in science.

Many people celebrated her memory after her death in January 2000. In 2015, Google put a Doodle on its homepage to honor her 101st birthday. As an actress and a scientist, the woman also had an asteroid named after her on the moon.