Hedy Lamarr - actress, inventor, and amateur engineer
54:08 Share

ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. She was talented in so many ways but became fed up, beyond belief, with the incessant male gaze. And last year a performer called Heather toured Australia to display the genius of her heroine. And here she is in the science show to remind us of Hedy Lamarr. MUSIC

¶¶

Hi, I am Heather Massey. I am a performer, playwright and producer of the solo play Hedy, The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. And a lot of my focus right now is also on developing my next piece on astronaut Sally Ride, America's first woman in space. Heather, what inspired you to write about space?

this wonderful person who lived a while ago and to produce this wonderful solo performance? Well, it's because I am an actress and I love science. And Hedy was an actress who loved science and technology. So it's a great marriage. We're kindred spirits.

I wanted to be an astronaut or an inventor or to work with animals when I was quite young, around eight years old. I started university in astrophysics.

but ended up with a theater arts degree. So some years after I've been working as a professional actor around the United States in New York City, I decided that I wanted to develop a show that I could take anywhere in the world, the most portable, and I wanted to feature a woman in science. And I was introduced to the story of Hedy Lamarr, and she has just

just such a dynamic story that would attract a lot of different types of audience members. And that's proven true because I'm still doing my work on her over seven and a half years later. Did you find a problem that she was a star way back and

may be modern people who are proudly ignorant of anything to do with history. In fact, they hardly teach it these days. They'd welcome being reminded of someone they'd never heard of before. Well, the thing is that the show works for people who have heard her name.

as a beautiful film star for people who know that she was also an inventor and for people who've never heard anything about her at all. That's the wonderful thing about it. And I will say, oddly enough, the fact that Mel Brooks had the character Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles

It was something that Hedy was not happy about, but I think that kept her name, at least in the American psyche, long enough for people to still remember her and now learn something new about her, that she was a genius inventor. Or maybe she was put off by the fact that in Blazing Saddles, of course, when the cowboys stood up, they went...

Well, she never liked to be made a joke of. The jeans were blazing, but tell me, you said she was so beautiful. She was beautiful, but she said something about being beautiful that was rather stunning. What did she say? Any girl can be glamorous.

All that you have to do is stand still and look stupid. OK, let's go back to how she became really famous. She married that man and clearly...

He was pretty well a fascist, wasn't he? He thought that the Wehrmacht was quite good. And there were all sorts of people who were genuine Nazis who came to dinner and Hedy had to sit there listening to their stuff, some of which was actually technical. Oh, yes. And she could understand all of it, maybe more than they did at some points. Yes.

She had a mind for how machinery worked. She wanted to know how systems operated. When she was five, she took apart her music box and put it back together to understand how it worked.

Her father, Emil Kiesler, he really fostered her inquisitive nature and he would take her on walks and teach her how a printing press works, how a streetcar works. And so she had a real capacity for understanding this kind of information. So when she's sitting there as a trophy wife and we have Mussolini there discussing munitions, she can understand the conversation. And remember the details. And remember the details. Well.

Very few of us, and I speak for myself, I can barely turn a switch to put the lights on. Oh dear, I'm sure you have much more capacity than that. Everyone knows. Then, of course, she did an amazing naughty film when she was quite young. Was it 19? I can't remember. Where she took all her clothes off.

Oh, yes. It was quite risque for the time. It was initially called Symphony de Libre, Symphony of Love, and it was renamed Ecstasy because of the content. So she ran through a field naked and swam in a lake. And there was a depiction, the first depiction in legitimate film of female orgasm, but

But it's very artistic. It's just her face. And it's clear she's fully clothed. But it was quite risque at the time. Her husband that we were just speaking about, Fritz Mandl, he spent nearly $300,000 on

of money valued at that time trying to buy up all the copies but then of course they just make more copies of it apparently Hitler had his own copy for viewing even though he banned it because of her Jewish heritage

Oh, she was Jewish as well. Yes, it was something that she wasn't ever able to own during her lifetime. She and Fritz married in a Rome Catholic church. And of course, when she made her way to Hollywood from Vienna, Louis B. Mayer did not let his players speak about religion, even though he was also Jewish. It was not a good thing for business at the time. So it was really something she took to her grave.

but would have affected her motivations for why she developed this frequency hopping spread spectrum technology for torpedo guidance in order to support the Allied forces against the Axis forces and Hitler. Her son Anthony worked very hard in his life. He passed about a year ago, but he really made it a mission that the world knows now about her contribution to

to society and how her invention of frequency hopping spread spectrum technology is used now in so many of our wireless systems. Like Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth,

It's used even in barcode scanning, mobile healthcare systems, military satellite guidance systems, all kinds of things. Now, Heather, your performance, you're on stage alone for all this time. Tell me, for those who haven't seen you so far, and of course you can be enjoyed to some extent online with singing and dancing and speaking and so on, but

But tell us about what happens when you start your show and what you do. So in the show, it's the audience who has summoned Hedy from the beyond to explain just how it is that someone so unexpected was able to create technology that we use every day. And Hedy is very excited and honored that the audience is interested in her invention and her intellect as opposed to her face. Yeah.

And so that's through the show, Hedy tells the story of her life and how she was able to create this technology. And the most important relationship is Hedy's relationship with the audience taking this journey forward.

However, I also play all of the other characters, 35 other characters in her story. No. Yes, yes. So that it's told in present tense, in real time. And I find that for me, that's much more exciting as an audience member to see a story told in this way as opposed to someone just...

just talking about their life in past tense for the full time. That would just be more like an autobiography, which can just be read instead of being a theatrical performance. But my goal is to tell the stories of women and science through theater, and I make that as dramatic as possible to create a wonderful experience for the audience. Have you already featured another heroine, if you like, of science?

Well, my goal is to have a trilogy of shows featuring women in science and technology. So I have Hedy Lamarr. The next I'm working on now is astronaut Sally Ride, America's first woman in space. And for the third, I'm considering primatologist Jane Goodall.

the hardest working woman in the world who's still trying to save all of us. She's remarkable, isn't she? She's remarkable, yes. Let me give you a thought experiment. Now, it just so happens Australia is extremely surprising and it's really pioneered lots of branches of science and one of them is radio astronomy.

And there was a woman who did the mathematics brilliantly called Ruby Payne Scott. And some of us suggested that the James Webb telescope should be called the Ruby Payne Scott telescope because he was, after all, a bureaucrat rather than an actual scientist. And he was rather antisocial in some respects, as people have written in the journal Scientific American. However, Ruby Payne Scott, having done the mathematics...

of the ways in which radio waves were coming from vast distances and were being picked up, actually not terribly far from where I'm sitting, Dover Heights. There was a radar establishment put up on the hills which was converted to receive these. And Ruby Payne Scott did the maths to show how incredibly distant these signals were coming and then she lost her job. Do you know why?

No. She was discovered to be married. And it was not allowed in those days. Oh, dear. You could not be working at any kind of level. And they spotted she was married because she developed a bump and she was bailed up. Now, it's extraordinary. But these days, with any luck, as you show, people like Sally Ride are

welcomed as genuine achievers. Exactly. And that's part of my goal in developing the shows about Sally Ride is fostering a real understanding of what a precious jewel this earth is and that we need to be stewards of this earth and protect it. Because as much as I and many of us have this desire to go into outer space, we

Once you get there, you see just how tiny and fragile this world is and just how beautiful it is. Heather Massey, who toured Australia in 2024 and will be at the Arts Festival in Auckland, New Zealand in March, that's the 13th and the 16th, but would love to return here again. And today's programme continues with Sharon Carlton's investigation of this extraordinary story as broadcast once before.

This is the story about brains, beauty and breasts and how they are all linked to your mobile phone. It's also about the dark side of Hollywood fame. 100 years ago, a child was born in Vienna who would grow to be one of the great beauties of the Western world. But the actress Hedy Lamarr also had a passion for inventing.

The influential American business magazine Forbes described her as the most glamorous geek of all time. Sharon Carlton presents our report on Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood superstar and clever inventor. Hedy Lamarr was described as the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a movie superstar in the classic days of movies.

But she was also a very intelligent woman who was immensely frustrated that no one ever got past her beautiful face to her mind. She was an incredibly beautiful woman, which I think to a certain degree might have been her misfortune because she was making movies at a time when beautiful women were not also considered bright. But she was brilliant. She was a brilliant woman. And that was simply not noticed anymore.

Richard Rhodes and Trina Robbins, two authors giving their impressions of the 1940s Hollywood superstar Hedy Lamarr. Both have written extensively about her. They know her through books and letters, research and other people's memories. I also asked Hedy Lamarr's son, Anthony Loader, the same thing, to describe the woman behind that beautiful face. His response was not expected.

A very complicated person. She was the whip and she was the rose. The person that I knew is not the Hedy Lamarr that you know. It's a very big, dark room with some bright lights here and there that you're walking into at this time. I don't know if we should even go there. It was tricky being her son. She was swallowed up by Hollywood. She lost her essence, basically. Her train went off the track when she went through Hollywood.

You know, when a person is constantly told they're perfect, they start to believe it. It can be very difficult when they lost touch with being real. You know, people have to walk on eggshells around these people that are put on pedestals. So she was put way high up on a pedestal by a bunch of fools. And basically she was used until she wasn't pretty enough anymore.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a stunningly beautiful young actor in Vienna in the early 1930s. She was 19 when she married Friedrich Mandl, a fabulously wealthy arms dealer, a trader in deadly weapons. It wasn't long before Hedy realised she was just another of his many possessions.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning science and technology writer Richard Rhodes quotes Hedwig Kiesler in his book Hedy's Folly. I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. He was the absolute monarch in his own world. He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded and imprisoned.

Having no mind, no life of its own. Fritz Mandl was renowned for his glittering Viennese dinner parties, and he liked to display his gorgeous wife at the head of the table. Nazis, fascists and other potential customers were cultivated without scruple.

while Hedwig hated the dinners and the Nazis more so. She absorbed much of what was said about weapons in general, and in particular, the technical problems the Germans were having with remote-controlled bombs. Richard Rhodes. You know, in the mid-1930s, the Germans were developing their air force,

They had an entire contingent of pilots and crews and so forth fighting in Spain during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. They were also experimenting with how to bomb efficiently. And in particular, with the Spanish Navy, they were trying to bomb Spanish warships. It turns out that it's very difficult to drop a bomb from a plane onto a ship because the ship is so narrow.

So they were trying to develop a bomb that would glide, that would have small stubby wings on the sides and would glide down rather than drop down vertically.

To get such bombs to move forward faster than the plane, so the plane didn't overfly the device that it was controlling by radio, they came up with all sorts of new technologies, such as using hydrogen peroxide as a fuel for these glide bombs. But the main point is they had to control their glide bombs by radio.

So Hetty was in the middle of listening to a technology discussion over the dinner table at the Mandel Castle that was indirectly related to what her invention later turned out to be. So she had a good deal of informal background.

in the complicated but interesting problems of how to control explosive devices in the air. And after all, bombs, especially glide bombs, are really just simply aerial torpedoes. In fact, that's what they were called. People didn't used to speak of a torpedo as simply something that was under the water. They spoke of aerial torpedoes, they spoke of underwater torpedoes, and only later, when the aerial part was renamed

or rocket or whatever, did the word torpedo come to be pretty much uniquely used for the things that submarines launch. I'm in awe that Hedy even understood all this conversation. She left school at 16. She always wanted to be an actor. And she'd never shown any real interest in technology at all. So how did she even understand this sort of discussion between the Nazis and Mandel? Well, her father...

was a wealthy Viennese banker. And she was an only child and a very lovely child. She was beautiful as a six-year-old too.

Her father adored her and used to go walking through Vienna on the kind of daily walks that people took in those days with his little girl at his side. And to amuse himself and to amuse her, he used to tell her how the machinery of the world around them worked. He would explain if they walked past an electrical generating plant, which they did, he would explain how the electricity was generated.

If they rode a streetcar, which they did, he would explain how an electric streetcar worked. So she, by the time she was 16 years old, had absorbed a good deal of simply tacit knowledge of how technologies go. And I think importantly also, she would have associated that area of knowledge with her adoration for her beloved father.

And that's one part. The other part is she was intelligent. She was not asked to be intelligent when she was sitting at dinner with German and Italian generals and admirals who had come to Mandel's house in Vienna to talk about technology. But she was massively bored simply sitting there looking pretty. This is a woman who once said with great disdain, Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

She was not technically knowledgeable, particularly. Although, you know, later on when she became a hobbyist of invention, her home in Hollywood, she had all sorts of engineering manuals and various kinds of textbooks on the wall in the room that she set aside for inventing. So she was self-taught.

Trina Robbins, a San Francisco-based storyteller about women in history, including Hedy Lamarr, was totally unimpressed with the Austrian arms dealer.

Fritz Mandl was the third richest person in Austria, and he got that way by selling arms to Hitler and Mussolini. And ironically, he was Jewish, and he must have known. Of course, he knew how the Nazis and fascists were treating the Jews, but he didn't care. He just wanted to make a lot of money. And hey, he was a Nazi.

Hedy. Hedy was his trophy wife. She was 19 and she was very famous. And he wanted to basically own the most beautiful woman in Vienna as proof of what a successful man he was. And I think that Hedy was kind of impressed by him in the beginning. But pretty soon she was very disappointed because he kept her a prisoner in her own home. He had her watched all the time.

Eventually, Hedwig managed to escape the Mandel mansion by drugging a maid and pretending to be her. At least that's her version. She made her way to London and eventually to America. Meeting the head of MGM Studios in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, was the start of her international superstardom.

Meyer had seen the very risqué Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy, which Hedvig had made when she was only 17. The film caused a scandal. It was apparently the first time an actress had appeared totally nude on screen. Meyer obviously liked what he saw, as well as her acting abilities. He changed her name from Hedvig Kiesler to Hedy Lamarr, insisted she learn to speak like an American.

and MGM promoted her as the most beautiful woman in the world. Hedy's son, Anthony Loda, has seen beneath the glitter and the glamour. It was difficult for me to grow up with a person that I saw basically destroyed by an industry because the wonderful, happy, carefree Viennese Hedy was morphed into the movie star that had to be perfect and look perfect.

constantly and was constantly barraged with, oh, how beautiful you are and how wonderful you act and how great you are. And she became out of touch with her inner core, with her inner self. The world knew Hedy as a ravishingly lovely actor with thick, dark curls, pouting lips and come hither eyes. But Hedy, the technology inventor, would not be known for years.

In an attempt to tell American readers in particular about this unusual woman, Trina Robbins wrote a book called Hedy Lamarr and a Secret Communication System. It's actually a cartoon book, and we take up the story not long before America was to join the Second World War. MUSIC

Hedy enjoyed being famous and acting in movies, but she had also become worried about the war in Europe. All of Europe is at war against the Nazis now. America will surely enter the fight. How can I help defeat the Nazis?

At a Hollywood party, Hedy met a man who would change her life. Hedy, this is the composer George Antile. They call him the bad boy of music. Why is that? Because my music is not traditional. It's a bit offbeat. You're also a writer. I read your article that says America will soon go to war in Europe. You're right that American involvement is inevitable.

What a surprise that such a glamorous woman is also so intelligent. People seem to think that because I have a pretty face, I'm stupid. I have to work twice as hard as anyone else to convince people I have a brain in my head. Can you play the piano? Of course. Hedy and George sat to play together, and as they played, Hedy noticed something.

Why George, you keep changing the key and I have to change the key to keep up with you. You are making it into a game. This gives me an idea. George, I have thought of something that could make a big difference when America goes to war. Can you help me work it out? Sure, Hedy. But we can't talk in the middle of a noisy party.

Come to my house. Tomorrow. The next morning, Hedy visited George. Now, tell me, how can I help you? Playing piano with you last night gave me an idea. We can keep radio-controlled torpedoes from being sent off course by the enemy. How do you know about torpedoes? My first husband made torpedoes to sell to the Nazis. Fritz didn't know that I listened to everything he and the Nazis said.

They said that with radio-controlled torpedoes, the enemy could tune in to the sender's frequency and block the signals. It was a huge problem. And you have an idea to prevent enemy interference? Yes, and I got the idea while we were playing the piano. Hedy and George went to work right away.

What if we could keep changing the radio frequency that guides the torpedoes, just like you kept changing keys at the piano? Or the way we change radio stations? We need a device that will allow the transmitter and the receiver to stay on the same frequency, even when it changes quickly. We could put something like slotted paper piano rolls from pianolas into each torpedo.

In my ballet mécanique, I had 16 pianolas. All were linked by the piano rolls, all changing keys at the same time. Could a device like that fit into a torpedo? Yes. I think your idea will work, Hedy. We can have 88 different frequencies. Just like the 88 keys on a piano. Nice touch.

The enemy may try to knock out the signal, but with that many frequencies they will only affect a tiny part of the communication. The torpedo control wouldn't be affected. The next step is to get a patent. So we'll get credit for our invention.

The United States entered World War II in December 1941. By August the following year, Hedy and George's invention seemed more necessary than ever. George, our patent for a secret communication system has been granted. Neither Hedy nor George wanted to make money from their invention. I'm giving it to America to help stop the war. I'm grateful to be here and I want to give something back.

The Department of the Navy considered Hedy and George's invention. A secret communication system? It's supposed to be for guiding torpedoes. And just how does this idea work? But the Navy didn't think the plan would work, as George and Hedy soon realized. Hedy, we explained our invention by saying that certain parts of it work like the mechanism of a pianola.

That was a mistake. They needed a smaller mechanism than piano rolls. Piano rolls? And how are we going to put piano player parts in torpedoes? Hedy's secret communication system had to wait for the invention of a device small enough to fit. By the mid-1950s, transistors were used in radios. These electronic devices were needed to make Hedy's invention really work.

That excerpt was from the cartoon book Hedy Lamarr and a Secret Communication System. Trina Robbins, the author. This was a time in which beautiful women were not considered particularly bright. It was a very sexist time, of course. If you were beautiful, you weren't smart. And Hedy was very smart. But she had some wonderful leading men, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy. And they were allowed to be smart, but not her.

Let's not make people walking gods. Let's not get carried away. Let's keep it real. But it's not real. It's all fake. And words are fake. Thoughts are fake. Actions are fake. Friends are fake. Business is fake. It's all fake. And my mother at one point, when they dropped her and let her go...

She never developed anything else. She wanted to do inventing. George Antile wrote a letter to a friend describing her, saying Hedy is so childlike, all she wants to do is stay at home and invent things. Anthony Loder, Hedy's son. Trina's book mentions that Hedy was introduced to the radical new composer on the Hollywood scene, George Antile, at a dinner party.

What Trina doesn't mention was that at the time, Hedy was worried that she had small breasts, not befitting a world celebrity, and she wanted advice on how to make them bigger. Friends of Hedy's knew of this controversial composer, who also happened to have an intense interest in endocrinology, hormones and glands. Perhaps George Antile could help.

The dinner was arranged and the actor and the composer met. Richard Rhodes. It was there to his shock and surprise after he picked himself up off the floor having seen this beautiful woman. She said, I'd like to talk about my breasts with you. Once he recovered from that opening gambit, they began a lively conversation about how she might enlarge her breasts by taking the right hormones.

But this, I think, is the more serious part of the story. They were both people with a deep interest in what was going on in Europe at the time. And the time at this point in the story is 1939. The war has begun in Europe. George's younger brother, who was a diplomat and a courier for the American State Department, has been killed in an attack on a courier plane that he was flying in.

George is very, very concerned about finding a way to somehow stop the Nazis from taking over Europe. And Hedy, who is following the war not only as a new American citizen, but as a woman who was an Austrian and therefore whose country is at war with her new country, which has taken her in and made her a celebrity and made her wealthy. So she was truly in conflict about it all.

And perhaps because she had no children herself at that point, her focus was on what was happening to the children in England who were being removed from London and the countryside in order to spare them the German bombing, the Blitz of London. Removed by passenger ships to Canada. And one day in the fall of 1940, long before she met George Antile at the dinner party...

Hetty read to her horror that a shipload of several hundred children had been torpedoed by the German submarine fleet and had gone down and some 92 children had been killed. And she decided then and there, with the kind of remarkable grandiosity perhaps that only a Hollywood star might have, that she was going to do something about that.

So, for George and Hedy, there was something that brought them together beyond their mutual interest in the possibilities of endocrinology, and that was this terrible war, which had not yet impacted America because the United States didn't actually enter the war, of course, until December 1941. But because of their European connection, they were sensitized to what was happening in Europe at the time.

When Hedy and George played the piano together, George moved around the keys and Hedy followed. This key hopping gave Hedy the idea of frequency hopping and George was uniquely skilled to help her. He had produced a very strange musical composition called the Ballet Mécanique

With 16 pianolas, as well as not-so-musical instruments such as an air raid siren, saws, hammers and electric bells, plus two aeroplane propellers playing sort of in unison, George understood synchronisation and the workings of pianolas.

So, why was this rich, beautiful, intelligent woman spending time alone at home and not out tripping the Hollywood light fantastic? Head is son, Anthony Loder. She wrote a lot of letters to her mother in the early war years. And in one of the letters she wrote, men in Hollywood are greedy pigs.

So she didn't start off well, and she ended up worse. And I think Hollywood ruined her and made her miserable, sad, lonely, depressed. She was loved by millions, but she was never loved. Life for Hedy was impossible back then. And if anyone of her friends, Howard Hughes, George Anatole, anyone, encouraged her to do what really made her happy and what really completed her,

She'd probably be nothing but sketching and thinking and inventing. George Antile described the setting at Hedy's house for her inventions. Here, then, and at long last must suddenly come the true solution as to why Hedy does not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her.

Why, her drawing room, sure enough, is filled both with unreadable books and very usable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use. Why, apparently, she has no time for anybody except something ultra-mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents.

I believe it because I know. If there were some way to make the torpedo control like the player piano control, then you could run the torpedo by radio from, let's say, a plane that was flying overhead.

that would send a signal down to the torpedo, and they would have two synchronized player piano tapes, only smaller, of course, starting at exactly the same time with a motor that was attached to a clock. And then the tapes would have the holes in them that would change the frequency of the radios simultaneously in both mechanisms.

And if the radio's frequencies could be hopped around from one to another rapidly enough, then no one listening in and trying to jam the signal would be able to keep up because this person, the jammer, wouldn't know where the signal was going, unlike the torpedo and the person in the plane. That's the fundamental idea that came to be called frequency hopping.

It's interesting, particularly for us on The Science Show, because with these pianola rolls, as you say, I think you called them an early system of digital control, and that they were based originally on the punch cards of the early 19th century jacquard looms.

which were themselves the basis of Charles Babbage's first computer programs. Yes, exactly. It's wonderful how these things kind of drift from one area to another. I doubt very much if either Hedy or George knew anything about Babbage and all of that.

But the player piano technology, which was evidently developed independently or simultaneously in France, George learned of it when he was composing in Paris and was recording some of his performances, as were others as well.

In fact, Stravinsky was recording his music at the Player Piano Factory to make a master tape that would control not only the basic notes, but also the expression, a more complicated tape. In any case, they sat down, George and Hedy, and began to work on the idea of a player piano-like mechanism that could be built into a torpedo that would control and guide the torpedo to its target.

So they patent this idea and it's accepted. And I know, just having seen reproductions though, there are a lot of handwritten instructions and explanations on those patents. Just describe them for me because you've seen a lot more than I have. George basically sat down and drew the various components of this mechanism. And then they turned their idea over to a National Inventors Council.

which had been established in the United States even before the United States' participation in the war, to receive ideas from ordinary Americans that might not come through the formal channels of engineering and so forth, with the hope that perhaps with the whole population involved in trying to think of better mechanisms to fight the war, that some clever ideas would come through. Strangely enough, very few ever did.

In fact, the Antile Hedy patent was one of the very few. But when these professionals, professors of engineering and so forth, who were on the National Inventors Council, saw the basic idea that George and Hedy had come up with, they were greatly intrigued. And they gave these two amateurs access to engineering support equipment

And the help of a physicist from California Institute of Technology to develop the electronics, because of course there were radios involved in this as well as paper tape, to help them work out these ideas to the level where they could be perhaps applied. So the actual patent that eventually was indeed issued was

incorporated a level of technological skill well beyond what George and Hedy had and was a perfectly competent functioning mechanism by the time it was laid out in the patent.

What's ironic about the story, sadly, is that when the U.S. Navy was finally handed this bounty of invention that these two people had come up with, perhaps with the same spirit of bureaucratic incompetence that had led the U.S. Navy to develop torpedoes that missed their targets more often than they found them, the Navy's response was, what do you want to do? Put a player piano in a torpedo?

You can't do that. It's too big. Well, as George pointed out to the Navy engineers, the mechanism could have been made small enough to fit inside a pocket watch. I mean, after all, you could make it with wire, rather like the wire recording mechanisms that were used during those days before tape recording arrived. They just didn't get it. Author Richard Rhodes.

Anthony Loder. She actually wanted to leave the movies and go to Washington and go to the Inventors Council and just look at everybody's patent and make it better. She said, well, let me see how it works. I can probably think of ways to make it better. They said, no, it's more important that you sell war bonds and make movies and raise the morale. Did Hedy ever talk to you about her invention?

Yeah. When I was seven years old, we were up in the attic. We had moved to Houston, Texas, and there was a wood attic and plywood floor. And we were going through some boxes and she was opening. Oh,

Here's a patent I got for my invention. I said, you invented something, mom? Yeah, I invented a secret communication system. Oh, here's a key to the city of Trenton, New Jersey. Here's this magazine. Here's this script. And then she said, I also thought of swept wings for airplanes during the war. And when I was young, all the airplanes had wings that went straight out. And I looked at birds and the bird wings went back.

So I told my friend in the Navy, why don't you just bend the wings back like birds? She was talking like that, you know. She loved those things. She was happy when she talks about inventing and thinking and creating. And she was really sad and stressed and nervous and a wreck when she was in the Hollywood system. The frequency hopping patent dated August 11, 1942.

has George Antile's name and one Hedy Kiesler Markey, Markey being the name of her then-husband Ed Markey, the second of her six marriages. The patent was put on the shelf by the Navy and was classified as a military secret, which meant that no one else could see it. It simply then languished on the shelf for years. Hedy went back into the Hollywood fold.

Anthony Loda. She couldn't deal with being a mother. She was too nervous and on edge. So I spent many, many years away in schools and summer camps with caretakers. So she wasn't much of a mother in that regard. When I was very young, we spent time together because I was a cute, darling little boy. But

When I started to grow up, it became too much trouble, I imagine, for her to deal with and dealing with the Hollywood grind that she had to put up with. After Hollywood dropped her and let her go, I was up alone with her in her bedroom on Beverly Drive and

She says, sometimes I feel like I'm in a little rowboat in the middle of the ocean all alone. And that's basically how she fell. I mean, it's not easy to be the most beautiful woman in the world and stay that way. And it's not easy to be known for that and used for that and not having experience.

time or anyone encouraging her to develop the bright side of her, her smart, quick, solution-finding brain. She always had answers. She could join in on every conversation. She spoke seven languages. In the 1950s, someone noticed these patents sitting on the shelf and wondered if they had any value and turned them over to a Navy contractor.

and said, "Can you do anything with this?" And the Navy contractor people, competent engineers, realized that this was a wonderful way to prevent radio signals, let's say from ship to ship, from being jammed by the enemy.

and developed the technology only by now they were able to use the first miniaturized circuits of what would later become microchips, later become radio chips. And as soon as they developed the technology, it spread through the Navy like wildfire. 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. And in the years that followed, the technology spread through all of the military services. The satellite GPS system that we all now use commonly was originally developed as a secret military system.

and it used frequency hopping to protect the signals back and forth from the GPS satellites to the radios on the ground. Almost any kind of military communications you could think of was frequency hopped. Eventually, in the late 1970s, a lot of these by then mature technologies were declassified and turned over to the public domain for development for any commercial use anyone wanted.

At just that point, the car telephone was coming into use in the United States. And the car telephone people had the problem, if each telephone used one radio frequency, then there couldn't be in any given city more than perhaps 100 or 200 car phones talking at the same time, which of course would not be commercially viable.

They then turn to the recently made available technology of frequency hopping for its other and much more important ultimately use, which is because the hopping goes on so rapidly, the change from one frequency to another is several hundred times a minute. A lot of different people can talk at the same time without interfering with each other. Thousands indeed of phone calls.

So the technology then became available and is still used today with cell phones, which means all of us can talk on our cell phones, thousands and thousands at the same time, without anyone ever interfering with anyone else, to such an extent that it's even noticeable. There are times, of course, when two phones might land on the same signal, but they're only there for a fraction of a second at a time.

From one inspired idea over a piano, frequency hopping has infiltrated our lives. It was in Wi-Fi and GPS, and now in Bluetooth and cordless phones, wireless heart monitoring and barcode scanning, military and satellite communications.

It is now part of what's evolved into spread spectrum technology because it basically spreads signals over the electromagnetic spectrum, resulting in a highly efficient way of using different radio frequencies at the same time and without interference.

Interestingly, Hedy wrote, or had ghostwritten, an autobiography in 1966, but she didn't mention the invention. Mind you, the book did tend to concentrate on her physical exploits and not her intellectual ones. Did she even realise where frequency hopping had led? Anthony Loder. I hope so. I tried to make all that happen back around 20 years ago.

I made a decision to just stop stressing over all this negativity. And I decided to look for the good and praise it. So I started to sing the song of Hedy's invention and newspaper articles picked it up. Internet picked it up. People started writing books about it. Richard Rhodes wrote an excellent book. Hedy realized that what she came up with was important, but I don't think she knew how important it's going to be. The definition of importance is

the more people it affects over the longer period of time. So the longer this goes on and the more people it affects, the more important she'll be. She has her place in history now. She actually has a relationship with science.

And she's actually recognized as someone who contributed to science more so than some beautiful face in front of a camera. And that's what it's all about. That's real long-term significance compared to short-term insignificance.

Anthony has now spent a couple of decades researching who this woman he called Mother really was, and finally he's come to an understanding of the pressures of stardom and the subsequent insecurity and unhappiness that it engendered in the most beautiful woman in the world.

Oh, I think I love her more and care about her more. I've been doing everything I can to uplift her memory and uplift her name and to put her on a pedestal that means something so people can know that this girl who was so tormented in her life gave us all something to make our lives better.

George Antile, who died in 1959, and Hedy have now been given an array of accolades in recognition of their invention more than half a century after it was patented. Hedy and George's invention was not used as they had imagined, but the idea of quickly changing radio frequencies did become important in a range of technologies. In 1997, Hedy's contribution to society was finally recognised.

She was given the prestigious Pioneer Award by the American Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first of many honours to come. Hedy's son, Anthony Loader, accepted the award for her. Hedy sent a thank you tape. I'm happy that this invention has been so successful and will remain so in the future.

The latest tribute to the pair is their induction into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2014. But did spread-spectrum technology actually evolve from Hedy's original idea? Did Gutenberg really invent movable type? Or was it the Koreans 50 years before? Was Edison the sole inventor of the light bulb?

There were other patents like Hedy's. The Germans, Poles, Dutch and Swiss were working on similar ideas. Perhaps it's best put by another Hedy Lamarr author, Rob Walters, when he said, Invention is a rash more than a pimple. Hedy Lamarr's life ended when she was 85, alone in her home in Florida in January 2000.

Others may argue about the role and importance of her invention, but she died believing that at last the audience had given her a standing ovation. Our feature on Hedy Lamarr was written and presented by Sharon Carlton. Hedy Lamarr was played by Eleni Schumacher. Tim Rubin was George Antile and Raymond Jones was the narrator. The pianist was Guy Noble.

Production by David Fisher and Stephen Tilley. I'm Robin Williams.

And next week on The Science Show, Carl Smith takes us to Micronesia, 4,000 kilometres north of Australia, past Papua New Guinea. A story of one atoll's fight to survive as climate changes and how oral history combines with science to make a difference. Yes, science ranges widely from jazz and communication technology to islands and disruption. That's next week.

You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.