DidYouKnow…. Hedy Lamarr was often proclaimed as the ‘World’s Most Beautiful Woman’…but there was so much more…
The 26-yr-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood when, in September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down & sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. 77 children drowned in the bleak north Atlantic.
Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, who made America home since 1938, was outraged. She fought back by applying her engineering skills to develop a sonar sub-locator used in the Atlantic for the benefit of the Allies.
Like many famous stars of her day, she had a relationship with aerospace pioneer Howard Hughes. It was more cerebral than romantic — she helped him streamline his aircraft design.
”I thought the aeroplanes were too slow. I decided that’s not right. They shouldn’t be square, the wings. So I bought a book of fish, and I bought a book of birds, and then used the fastest bird, connected it with the fastest fish. And I drew it together and showed it to Howard Hughes and then he said, ‘You’re a genius.’”
The principles of her work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA and Bluetooth technology, and this work led her to being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.