Hedy Lamarr

📍12 Peter-Jordan-Straße, Vienna 1190, Austria

“I was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, the only child of Emil Kiesler, a bank director, and Gertrude Lichtwitz, a pianist. Vienna of the early twentieth century was one of the world's great intellectual capitals — Freud, Wittgenstein, Klimt — and the Jewish bourgeoisie that my family belonged to participated fully in this culture. I became a film actress — the most famous in Europe after a scandalous early film — and I married Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer, escaping eventually to Hollywood where I became Hedy Lamarr. But what I am most proud of is not the film career. During the Second World War, I co-invented with composer George Antheil a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system intended to make Allied radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect or jam. The patent was ignored for decades. The technology became the basis of Bluetooth and WiFi. The Vienna childhood gave me the mind; Hollywood gave me the platform I didn't really want.”

Sources: Rhodes, R. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr (2011), Doubleday; Young, C. Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (2010), University Press of Kentucky; Lamarr, H. Ecstasy and Me (1966), Bartholomew House