Hedy Lamarr, the star movie that sowed the seed of WiFi
Born 14 November 1914. Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born into a Jewish family. At 16 he began studying engineering, but three years later, in 1933, he entered the theater world as a student of director Max Reinhardt. His first film was in 1937: Ecstasy, from Czech Gustav Machatý. It was the first time a woman appeared naked in a commercial film, and in another scene, the young actress performed an orgasm in the foreground.
The arms industry tycoon Fritz Mandl saw the film and decided to marry the actor. He arranged the marriage with his parents, not counting on Kiesler's opinion. Although it was also of Jewish origin, Mandl sold arms to the Italian fascists and the German Nazis. He was also a personal friend of Hitler and, above all, of Mussolini. Those who lived next to Mandl were years of slavery. Her husband tried to destroy all copies of Ecstasy, forced her to leave the actor's career and didn't let her leave home if she wasn't with him. Keisler took advantage of his confinement to resume engineering studies and, after listening to her husband’s clients and suppliers, learned a lot about the weapons technology of the time.
In 1937 he left to Paris fleeing from his husband and then to London. There was Louis B. He met Mayer, the study leader Goldwyn Mayer. He sold jewelry and crossed the Atlantic on the same boat as Mayer. Before landing he had a seven-year contract and a new name: Hedy Lamarr.
He worked in a total of 30 films with King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, Jacques Torme... and resigned to major projects, Ingrid Bergman is sure to sincerely thank him for rejecting the leading roles of Casablanca (1942) and Gaslight (1944).
The fact is that on the occasion of the years of World War II, driven by her religion and those she saw with her former husband, she began working for the allies. The same year that Casablanca was released, Hedy Lamar designed and patented a secret communication system with the help of composer George Antheil. Thanks to the invention based on frequency switching, torpedoes could be conducted by radio, without being seen by the enemy.
It was too early; the invention could not be applied until electronic systems replaced the old mechanical systems. Thus, the Lamar system was first used in 1962, during the missile crisis in Cuba. It was also used in the Vietnam War, but from the 1980s the idea became a real toy in the field of civil engineering. As digital technology expanded, frequency switching enabled WiFi data communication. And the Bluetooth standard. And the GPS system ...
Those who are curious may know that Fritz Mandl failed to destroy all copies of Ecstasy and that Hedy Lamar's nude and orgasm can be seen on the Internet thanks, among other things, to the technology he invented in 1942.
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