She was a glamorous Hollywood actress who romanced Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart onscreen and was hailed as "the world's most beautiful woman."
But Hedy Lamarr was bored.
So in a private life more compelling than some of her movies, she dreamed up ways to fight the Nazis during World War II and earned a patent for an idea that laid the groundwork for such modern technologies as Bluetooth, GPs and Wi-Fi.
Lamarr, on what would have been her 101st birthday, was honored Monday with an animated doodle
on Google's search page. The jazzy clip pays homage to her remarkable
double career -- actress by day, inventor by night -- and introduces the
late star to a new generation at a time when the science and technology
fields are struggling to attract women.
"She's just so cool," said
Jennifer Hom of Google, who researched Lamarr's life to create the
animated clip. "She was very complicated and very accomplished at the
same time."
Born
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria, Lamarr began working as an actress
in Europe as a teenager and scandalized audiences in the Czech film
"Ecstasy," in which the camera lingered on her face as her character had
an orgasm. She fled an abusive marriage in the late 1930s and came to
Hollywood, where she changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, signed a contract
with MGM and landed many roles as an exotic seductress.
Lamarr
appeared onscreen regularly throughout the 1940s, most notably opposite
Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah." But she grew
weary of femme fatale roles that didn't showcase her intelligence.
"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid," she famously said.
So during World War II, Lamarr drew upon
her interest in science and military technology -- gained in part
through her first marriage to an arms dealer -- to help devise a system
to prevent the Nazis from blocking signals from radio-controlled Allied
torpedoes. She teamed with composer George Antheil, a neighbor, to
create a frequency-hopping system -- based on the 88 keys in pianos --
that would keep enemies from being able to detect the radio messages.
They
received a patent for their idea, although the limitations of
technology at the time prevented it from being implemented until after
World War II. Still, their system would eventually form a basis for
modern wireless communications technology, and Lamarr and Antheil were
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
As
research for her Google doodle, Hom watched a lot of Lamarr's movies
and read books about her. She was impressed to learn the actress
tinkered with mechanics and electrical engineering in her spare time and
had a room in her home that was dedicated to inventing.
Hom's
doodle alternates between scenes of movie-star glamor and Lamarr's
sideline as an inventor. The actress looks bored in the back of a limo
but perks up when she's tinkering with theories in her lab.
"She
was really curious and had an active intellect and she was always
trying to learn," said Hom, who spent two months full-time working on
the doodle. "I like to think of her as superhero figure where you have a
daytime personality and a nighttime personality."
Lamarr
died in 2000 at the age of 86. Who knows what kind of prescient tech
entrepreneur she might have been as a young woman in the digital age?
One quote from the actress, found on her estate's website, sounds like it could have been spoken yesterday.
"The
world isn't getting any easier. With all these new inventions I believe
that people are hurried more and pushed more," she said. "The hurried
way is not the right way; you need time for everything -- time to work,
time to play, time to rest."
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