{"id":12607,"date":"2013-02-13T13:21:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T17:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devwp.davison.com\/blog\/?p=12607"},"modified":"2020-11-17T11:12:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T16:12:44","slug":"women-inventors-hedy-lamarr-actress-model-inventor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/blog\/women-inventors-hedy-lamarr-actress-model-inventor\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Inventors: Hedy Lamarr… Actress, Model, Inventor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why is it that when someone says the word \u201cinventor,\u201d we immediately think of a man?\u00a0 Go ahead, think \u201cinventor\u201d and see who pops into your head.\u00a0 I\u2019ll bet its Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell or even Ron Popeil, the guy who does all of those infomercials.\u00a0 But, I\u2019ll bet none of you thought of a woman.\u00a0 Well, you might say, there are tons of male inventors but hardly any women.\u00a0 But, I\u2019d say, you couldn\u2019t be farther from the truth.<\/p>\n

Over the years, there have been hundreds of women who have invented all kinds of things.\u00a0 Things like windshield wipers, colored flares, the automatic dishwasher, the typing correction fluid Liquid Paper (once as indispensible as the delete key on your laptop), Scotchgard, Barbie dolls, the dye laser, and the \u201cstronger than steel\u201d material Kevlar.\u00a0 All of these and many, many others were either created or improved by women.\u00a0 And, I\u2019m not even counting the tremendous innovations in the medical field, like the medical syringe in use at every doctor\u2019s office and clinic, and Nystatin, the anti-fungal drug used to cure many disfiguring, disabling fungal infections.<\/p>\n

\"\"But, one female inventor caught my imagination, mostly because I\u2019m an old movie buff.\u00a0 When I read that Hedy Lamarr, an actress I\u2019ve watched many times, was also an inventor, I just had to find out more.\u00a0 It turns out that her real name was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler and she was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in 1913.\u00a0 As a model, her tremendous good looks (she was called the “most beautiful woman in Europe”) landed her a role in a European movie called Ecstasy, which became a big hit and catapulted her career to Hollywood.\u00a0 Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, she became a huge star, appearing in such movies as \u201cBoom Town\u201d with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and Cecil B. DeMille’s \u201cSamson and Delilah.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, unbeknownst to most people, while she was acting in all of those movies in the 1940s (and raising two children), she was also busy inventing.\u00a0 And, not your everyday ordinary stuff \u2013 but super-spy-type stuff.\u00a0 It turns out that she was a mathematical whiz who co-invented a torpedo guidance system for the Navy.\u00a0 And, not just any torpedo guidance system, but a “frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum” guidance system. \u00a0WOW.<\/p>\n

During World War II, radio controlled torpedoes were in full use by the US and Allies.\u00a0 The problem was that if the Germans could identify the frequency the torpedo was being controlled on, they could jam it and make it miss its target.\u00a0 What Lamarr and her partner realized was that if the torpedo could randomly change its frequency, then someone trying to jam the signal wouldn’t know which frequency it was on.\u00a0 The key was to make both the transmitter and the receiver simultaneously jump from frequency to frequency \u2013 a difficult effort at best. But, they worked on an invention based on a player piano music roll and eventually invented a guidance device machine that could modulate its frequency at will.<\/p>\n

Today, frequency hopping is used with wireless phones, GPS, many military communication systems and the principal anti-jamming device used in the U.S. government’s Milstar defense communication satellite system.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Lamarr and her partner never got any of the credit (or money) from their idea.\u00a0 They had signed away the patent rights to the Navy, who engaged the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division, in Buffalo, New York, to develop the idea into what it is today.<\/p>\n

So, while most people will probably only remember Hedy Lamarr as the fabulous beauty in those old movies we watch on cable TV, you and I will know differently.\u00a0 We will know that she was an inventor as well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

SOURCES<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.inventions.org\/culture\/female\/index.html<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.inventions.org\/culture\/female\/lamarr.html<\/p>\n

http:\/\/science.howstuffworks.com\/innovation\/inventions\/10-things-that-women-invented.htm#page=2<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hedy_Lamarr<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/hedy-lamarr-movie-star-inventor-of-wifi\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why is it that when someone says the word \u201cinventor,\u201d we immediately think of a man?\u00a0 Go ahead, think \u201cinventor\u201d and see who pops into your head.\u00a0 I\u2019ll bet its Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell or even Ron Popeil, the guy who does all of those infomercials.\u00a0 But, I\u2019ll bet none of you thought …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,793,15,66],"tags":[930,931,932,933,934,935,936,937],"class_list":["post-12607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation-2","category-innovative-inventions","category-inventions","category-inventor-stories","tag-hedy-lamarr","tag-hedy-lamarr-actress","tag-hedy-lamarr-inventor","tag-hedy-lamarr-model","tag-woman-inventor","tag-woman-inventors","tag-women-inventor","tag-women-inventors"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWomen Inventors: Hedy Lamarr... 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The inventions have sold in Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, Amazon and more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/blog\/women-inventors-hedy-lamarr-actress-model-inventor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Davison\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/DavisonInvent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-02-13T17:21:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-11-17T16:12:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Hedy-Lamarr.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"nikki\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@Davison\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@Davison\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"nikki\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Women Inventors: Hedy Lamarr... 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