Mother of GPS & WI-FI

In 1933, a beautiful, young Austrian woman took off her clothes for a movie director. She ran through the woods, naked. She swam in a lake, naked.

The most popular movie in 1933 was King Kong. But everyone in Hollywood was talking about that scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.

Louis B. Mayer, of the giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The film was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price.

The star of the film, called “Ecstasy,” was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of her beauty was “to stand there and look stupid.” In reality, Kiesler was anything but stupid.

At the time she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Austria. Friedrich Mandl was Austria’s leading arms maker. His firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis.

Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners. These gatherings included representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces.

One of Mandl’s favorite topics at these gatherings was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles. These gatherings included meals with Hitler and Mussolini. He also talked about torpedoes.

As a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis. She abhorred her husband’s business ambitions.

Mandl responded to his willful wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau.

In 1937, she managed to escape. She drugged her maid. She snuck out of the castle wearing the maid’s clothes. She sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London and she got out just in time.

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl’s factory. He was half Jewish. Mandl fled to Brazil. (Later, he became an adviser to Argentina’s iconic populist president, Juan Peron.)

In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM’s biggest stars.

She appeared in more than 20 films. She was a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster.

But Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies.

At the height of her fame in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications system. It was optimized for sending coded messages that couldn’t be “jammed.”

She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their targets. She was building a system to kill Nazis.

By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces used single frequency radio-controlled technology. Kiesler’s ex-husband had been peddling this technology.

In Hollywood, she was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes.

She dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood. However, Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in her and gave her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set.

She had an inventing table set up in her house. The small set allowed her to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind the process.

The actress/inventor was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military.

She even bought books of fish and birds to study the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

The actress wanted to enlarge her breasts. She was introduced to avant garde composer and amateur endocrinologist George Antheil at a dinner party. This introduction happened after the outbreak of war in 1939. Though their conversation about hormones failed to yield the desired result, a duet on the piano ended up producing an unlikely scientific breakthrough.

Antheil, who was famous for his work with pianolas or player pianos, kept changing key, forcing her to keep up.

After they finished, she told him of her idea to fight Nazi Germany. This idea involved a piano roll-like system. It could change the radio frequencies used to control torpedoes. This change would protect them from interference or jamming.

Later, he explained why the actress did “not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her?”

“Why is her drawing room sure enough filled with unreadable books and very usable drawing boards?” Antheil asked and answered. “They look as if they are in constant use. Why apparently does she have no time for anybody except something ultra-mysterious?”

She and Antheil patented their frequency hopping device in 1942 and approached the US Navy with the idea.

Navy bureaucrats fundamentally misunderstood the idea. However, the idea was not revisited until the 1950s. With the advent of miniature circuits and eventually microchips, the technology proved enormously useful.

‘As soon as they developed the technology, it spread through the Navy like wildfire,’ said author Richard Rhodes. ‘This was just an absolutely wonderful system for protecting radio communications.”

“By the time of the Cuban missile crisis all of the ships that were involved in quarantining Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis were equipped with frequency hopped radios. In the years that followed, the technology spread through all of the military services.”

Eventually, frequency hopping would contribute to virtually every major communications technology, from GPS to Wi-Fi and the mobile phone network.

Despite the successes of Hollywood and her inventions, she became increasingly reclusive and was arrested for shoplifting in 1966, the year her autobiography was released.

“I had made—and spent—some thirty million dollars. Yet earlier that day I had been unable to pay for a sandwich at Schwab’s drug store,” she wrote. She moved to Miami Beach and was involved in a series of lawsuits. In 1991 she was arrested again, this time for stealing $20 of laxatives and eye drops.

Yet towards the end of her life (she died in 2000), she began to receive the recognition she deserved for her brains. It was not just her beauty that was acknowledged.

Her son, Anthony Loder, accepted a Pioneer Award from the American Electronic Frontier Foundation on her behalf in 1997. In 2014, she was posthumously inducted into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Most readers won’t recognize the name Kiesler. And no one would remember the name Hedy Markey. It’s a fair bet that readers of a certain age will remember one of Hollywood’s golden age beauties. She was Hedy Lamarr. That’s the name Louis B. Mayer gave to his prize actress.

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