T E C H N O L O G Y

Inventing beauty
Robert P. Crease revels in the life of a Hollywood 
goddess who pioneered wireless technology.

Hedy Lamarr was no mere Hollywood starlet. The twentieth-century Aus-trian–American actress was also a 
tech-head, taking inspiration from the self-
playing ‘player piano’ to create technology of 
a type now used in mobile phones. Richard 
Rhodes’s biography, Hedy’s Folly, gives this 
side of her story its due.

For some, her intelligence sits uneasily 
with her exquisite looks, and her invention 
looks like an eccentric sideline. Another 
biography — Hedy Lamarr by cinematic 
scholar Ruth Barton, published last year — 
was a solid portrait but devoted just ten pages 
to Lamarr’s undercover life as an inventor. 
However, her engineering work, conducted 
largely in collaboration with avant-garde 
US composer and pianist George Antheil, 
was genuine. The duo patented a wire-
less technology to prevent jamming of 

remote-controlled torpedoes. This was 
the first use of a system that, thanks to the 
particular way in which it allowed multiple 
users to share a common band, would later 
be incorporated into Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 
most cordless phones.

An award-winning author on the history of 
the US atomic-weapons programme, Rhodes 
puts Lamarr’s inventive spirit into coherent 
context. Despite its title, the book is nearly 
as much about Antheil: he spent the 1920s 
in Europe writing controversial composi-
tions for player pianos — an early form of 
entertainment centre involving a primitive  
version of digital control. Antheil’s ‘orchestras’ 
incorporated other far-
out instruments: saws, 
hammers, electric bells, 
sirens and even a pair 
of aeroplane propellers.

Rhodes is not as 
good at conjuring the 
cultural climate as he is 
at describing technolo-
gies, so the book only 
really takes off when 
Lamarr meets Antheil 
in Hollywood in 1940. 
But  t he  c el ebr it y -
riddled parties, open-
ings and European 
premieres of Lamarr’s 
day job were hardly 
a drab background 
to her hidden hobby, 
and her progression 
to stardom makes for 
fascinating reading.

B orn in 1913 to 
a Jewish family in 

Vienna as Hedwig Kiesler, she grew into a 
beautiful teenager and was soon appearing 
in German films. The erotically charged 1933 
Czech film Ecstasy made her a sensation: in it, 
she swims backstroke nude in a shimmering 
lake, and appears, famously, with bare breasts.

That summer, Kiesler married the first of 
her six husbands, a wealthy arms merchant 
who entertained German and Austrian 
weapons developers. Neither he nor his 
guests seemed to appreciate that their gor-
geous hostess could follow conversations 
about submarine torpedoes and remote-
control devices. When her husband tried to 
make her give up acting, she divorced him.

Kiesler moved to Hollywood, became 
Hedy Lamarr, and was soon a ravishing 
starlet in films such as Algiers (1938), the 
trailer for which contained the line (uttered 
by French actor Charles Boyer): “Come with 
me to zee Casbah!” But she was proud of her 
mental acuity. “Any girl can be glamorous,” 
she said. “All you have to do is stand still and 
look stupid.”

During the Second World War, Lamarr 
played glamour roles in films such as Ziegfeld 
Girl (1941), in which she wore a jewelled 
peacock-feather headdress. Meanwhile, she 
and Antheil had been hard at work applying 
for patents on weapons-related devices.

Their meeting and collaboration came at 
a fortuitous time for Antheil. He had been 
down on his luck, reduced to writing popu-
lar articles for Esquire magazine advising 
readers to evaluate women based on their 
glands. Lamarr hoped to tap into his exper-
tise to find a way to augment her breasts. 
Antheil couldn’t help her, but the two dis-
covered a shared passion for pianos and for 
inventing. (Rhodes finds it “highly unlikely” 
that they were lovers.)

Lamarr happened to mention an idea 
she’d had about how to prevent jamming 
of remote-controlled torpedoes. Rhodes 
puts this simply: “If a radio transmitter and 
receiver are synchronized to change their 

Hedy Lamarr co-invented a technology to prevent remote-controlled torpedoes from being jammed.

Hedy’s Folly: 
The Life and 
Breakthrough 
Inventions of Hedy 
Lamarr, the Most 
Beautiful Woman 
in the World
RICHARD RHODES
Doubleday: 2011.  
272 pp. $26.95

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N

 NATURE.COM
For more on women 
and patents:
go.nature.com/t5u5kp

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And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life 
Charles J. Shields Henry Holt 544 pp. £20 (2011) 
The late Kurt Vonnegut carved out his own literary landscape — 
blending dystopian tendencies, pitch-dark humour, autobiography 
and elements of his grounding in chemistry. Authorized biographer 
Charles J. Shields’s exhaustive research does justice to him. 
Whether it is the dimension-hopping Trafalmadorians, ice-nine  
(a solid water) or the shenanigans of fictional sci-fi writer Kilgore 
Trout, Vonnegut used the fantastical to comment astutely on the 
human condition. His honesty, Shields reminds us, is still needed. 

Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller 
Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World 
Catherine Tumber MIt Press 192 pp. $24.95 (2011) 
Detroit in Michigan may be Motown — an intrepid city founded on car 
manufacture — but depopulation, ill-conceived infrastructure and the 
flight of industry have left it devastated. Yet historian and journalist 
Catherine Tumber sees such urban wastelands as tomorrow’s 
sustainability hubs. Low population density, proximity to farmland, 
and a skilled workforce could aid the advent of renewable-energy 
technology. Plucking ideas from 25 small cities in the US Rust Belt, 
Tumber outlines a plausible route to a ‘repurposed’ future.

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History 
Alison Winter UnIversIty of CHICago Press 312 pp. £19.50 (2011)
Notions of how memory works have shifted wildly over time. Historian 
Alison Winter traces the evolution of memory sciences through 
‘fragments’, or flashbulb moments. Drawing on sources from 
neurological research to diaries, she shows how the understanding 
of memory has deepened, ramified and sometimes taken wrong 
turns. Case studies include the extreme brain surgery performed 
by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield; forensic hypnosis (as 
used in the book The Manchurian Candidate); psychologist Frederic 
Bartlett’s studies of remembering; and false-memory syndrome.

Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions 
Chris Linder UnIversIty of CHICago Press 288 pp. £26 (2011) 
A century of polar science has seen vast change, not least in the 
researchers still braving the blizzards and gelid waters. To give an 
idea of their daily realities, oceanographer and photographer Chris 
Linder and several embedded journalists followed four Arctic and 
Antarctic expeditions studying, variously, an Adelie penguin colony, 
the Bering Sea in spring, the Greenland ice sheet and ocean pack ice 
in the eastern Arctic. The vivid images — of fishing for zooplankton 
at dawn, intent ice-breaking crews, Ernest Shackleton’s hut at Cape 
Royds, for instance — enliven a detailed yet accessible chronicle.

Mushroom 
Nicholas P. Money oxford UnIversIty Press 224 pp. $24.95 (2011)
Botanist Nicholas Money is unashamedly in thrall to the ‘fungal 
sex organ’. In this brilliant scientific and cultural exploration, these 
organisms of rot and soil positively sparkle. From biology to medicine, 
cuisine and recreation, this is a history as convoluted as the systems 
of fungal filaments that enrich woodlands. A human and mycological 
cast of thousands throngs the pages — from a 10-kilometre-square 
colony of honey fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, to 
Charles McIlvaine, author of One Thousand American Fungi, who 
fearlessly chomped his way through many of them. 

tuning simultaneously, hopping together 
randomly from frequency to frequency, then 
the radio signal passing between them can-
not be jammed.” This process is now referred 
to as ‘frequency hopping’ or ‘spread spec-
trum’. Experience with player pianos had 
made Antheil proficient at getting machines 
to communicate in synchrony, so Lamarr 
recruited him to provide a proof of principle. 

Using available documents and inter-
views, Rhodes retraces the steps that guided 
Lamarr in her thinking, and the genesis 
and development of the pair’s other inven-
tions. He explains why the US Navy had no 
immediate use for the patent: its existing tor-
pedoes were so problematic that it had no 
interest in developing another system, and 
Navy technicians misunderstood aspects of 
the Lamarr–Antheil design. So it was filed 
away. Rhodes charts the later, independ-
ent developments of the technology and its 
subsequent uses, notably in the Sonobuoy (a 
sonar system in a buoy) developed by the US 
Navy. The patent expired the year Antheil 
died, in 1959, when it was still classified.

The technology the two invented emerged 
from secrecy in 1976 and found wide appli-
cation in commercial communications. In 
1997, the inventors were given (Antheil post-
humously) a Pioneer Award by the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation, a non-profit com-
munications industry group based in San  
Francisco, California. But from the end of the 
1940s, Lamarr’s Hollywood career had begun 
to drift down an all-too-familiar path. Her 
film performances had grown hammier, as 
in the overwrought and pretentious Samson 
and Delilah (1949). She gradually acquired 
a reputation reminiscent of Sunset Boule-
vard’s Norma Desmond, was arrested twice 
for shoplifting and died in 2000.

Although the book is mainly about her 
collaboration with Antheil, its cover sports 
a collage of Lamarr the starlet sitting on a 
long golden torpedo. Yet again we are asked 
to marvel at the spectacle of actress–inventor  
as oddity. Does this reflect sexism, the  
disbelief that beauty is compatible with  
intelligence? Would we be less surprised if 
her on-screen persona had been less erotic 
and more like Katharine Hepburn’s? Or 
perhaps there is a deeper cultural prejudice 
at work — the platonic notion that the skill 
involved in imitating the world is incompat-
ible with that of understanding it.

Inside its cover, Rhodes’s book gives us 
the whole Hedy — a closet geek in peacock 
feathers — and makes that mix believable. 
Now it is up to us to figure out why we find 
that hard to digest. ■

Robert P. Crease is a philosopher at Stony 
Brook University, New York, USA. He is a 
columnist for Physics World, and his latest 
book is World in the Balance. 
e-mail: rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

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	Technology: Inventing beauty