The Movie Star Who Invented Your Wi-Fi

In 1942, Hedy Lamarr was the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. She had starred in over thirty films. Her face had sold more tickets than most studios knew what to do with.

She was also, in her spare time, an inventor.

Together with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, Lamarr developed a system for guiding torpedoes by radio while making them impossible to jam. The idea was elegant: transmitter and receiver would hop between frequencies in a synchronized pattern, like the coordinated rolls of a player piano. They filed a patent. They gave it to the Navy.

The Navy told her she'd be more useful selling kisses at war bond drives.

So she did. She raised millions. The patent — U.S. Patent 2,292,387, filed under her married name, H.K. Markey — was classified and filed away. It sat in a drawer for twenty years. It expired in 1959. Three years later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military finally implemented the technology.

By then, of course, there was nothing to license. The patent that would become the foundation of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS earned Hedy Lamarr exactly nothing.

In 1997, at eighty-two, she received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. When told the news, she is said to have replied, "It was about time."