Actress Hedy Lamarr made a valuable contribution to the intelligence division by co-producing an anti-jamming device for torpedoes. She also devised a clever way of “frequency hopping” that prevented the interception of American military messages. Famous for the “Road” movies with Bob hope, everyone knew she was an actress but few were aware she was an inventor of military importance.

“In pre-war Austria between 1933 and 1937 she had been married to Friedrich Mandl chairman of Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik, a leading armaments firm founded by his father, Alexander Mandl. Mandl, partially of Jewish descent, was a supporter of Austrofascism, although not Nazism,” according to Wikipedia. The plot thickens…

Although his wife Hedy didn’t share his political ideologies, apparently, she did have an eye for military technologies. And she escaped to the West, in dramatic fashion.

According to her autobiography,  Ecstasy and Me (1966), once while running away from Friedrich Mandl, she slipped into a brothel and hid in an empty room. While her husband searched the brothel, a man entered the room and she had sex with him so she could remain hidden. She was finally successful in escaping when she hired a new maid who resembled her; she drugged the maid and used her uniform as a disguise to escape.Lamarr later sued the publisher claiming that many of the anecdotes in the book, which was described by a judge as “filthy, nauseating, and revolting”, were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild, [who probably was thinking it was some sort of spy story.]

Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam’s 1920 patent Secrecy Communication System (1598673) seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil’s patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.

Remarkably, Hedy did not invent anything else. Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.

Hedy Lamarr is recognized as an inventor, as much as an actress, and her birthday, November 9, is National Inventor’s Day in German-speaking countries. Who knew?