LAMARR, HEDY

LAMARR, HEDY (Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; 1914–2000), actor, inventor. Born in Vienna, Austria, Lamarr attended max reinhardt 's famous acting school in Berlin as a teenager. She made her film debut in the 1933 Czech picture Extase (Ecstasy), for which she earned international notoriety as the first woman to appear naked in a feature film. The movie was extensively edited before it was shown in American theaters; its leading lady, arriving in Hollywood in 1937, was renamed and signed by MGM'S louis b. mayer . Lamarr had an extensive career as a movie actress, appearing in such films as Algiers (1938), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), White Cargo (1942), and, most notably, as Delilah in Samson and Delilah (1948). Professionally, Lamarr also played a much different role, that of inventor. From 1933 to 1937, as the wife of Fritz Mandal, a manufacturer of military aircraft, Lamarr was first exposed to the field of control systems. She pursued her interest in radio control long after her marriage – the first of six – had ended. In 1940, Lamarr presented her concept of "frequency hopping" to her Hollywood neighbor, the avant-garde composer George Antheil, who is best known for his revolutionary Ballet Méanique. Lamarr was working on a way to protect radio signals from being heard or interfered with by outside parties; Antheil proposed a design based on the player-piano, by which the radio signal would travel at 88 constantly shifting frequencies. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent in 1942, but their ideas were not put to significant use until the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when they were used to provide secure communications among American ships. Lamarr's "frequency hopping" is the basis for today's "spread spectrum," a design now applied to such mainstream technology as the cellular phone. (Casey Schwartz (2nd ed.)