Hedy Lamarr was born on Nov. 9, 1914 in Austria to Jewish parents. She went on to become “the most beautiful woman in the world.” At age 5, she took apart a music box and reassembled it. Her love of inventing was born. But she became more famous as an actress than as an inventor. Her first major film was “Ecstasy” which became notorious for its nudity. It was banned in America and Germany. Her most famous film was Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah”. Her first, of six, husbands was a wealthy Austrian arms manufacturer. Her home was visited by numerous Nazi and fascist officials, including Benito Mussolini. However, she was anti-Nazi and before the war she attempted to help the Allies by inventing (with her partner composer George Antheil) a device to block enemy ships from jamming torpedo guidance systems. It relied on “frequency hopping”. The U.S. Navy was not receptive at the time, but eventually put the invention into effect. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the technology was used to make sonic buoys that could discover Soviet submarines. Frequency hopping was later used in the development of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. In 2014, she was elected to the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
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