Science Bae Wednesday: Hedy Lamarr

At the suggestion of the brilliant Australian extraordinaire, Jessica, this week's Science Bae Wednesday honors Hollywood actress/scientist/inventor, Hedy Lamarr.

If you are reading this post on a wifi internet connection, you have this stunning broad to thank for that. Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 Vienna, Lamarr (born to a father who died when she was 21, and a Jewish mother), used her influence as a Hollywood actress to spare her mother the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Hedy was married to a man who was a complete buzz-kill about her career. This jerk, even though he was half-Jewish himself, was a major munitions supplier to Hitler and Mussolini. He even had lavish parties where he hosted prominent members of the Nazi party. Hedy saw right through this nonsense and used it as an springboard to expand her knowledge. At this point, she decided she was super bored with acting (and, incidentally, the jerk husband) anyway and started tinkering around with applied science as, let's get real, we all should be doing whenever we get bored. She soon realized that science was far more awesome than acting ever could be (she's my kind of gal), and started to tackle the very real problem of those Axis assholes scrambling Allied comms during WW2. This was a big problem, because the torpedoes we were using to send the Axis troops to their maker were being controlled by radio signals.

Using what she learned from attending meetings with her jerk husband years before, Hedy partnered up with George Antheil (himself a low-grade bae) and started to work on frequency-hopping technology that would negate the effects of Axis interference. This creative and tenacious woman used a piano roll to, in short bursts, unpredictably change the frequency sent between the control center and torpedo. They used 88 frequencies in the radio spectrum because there are 88 black and white keys on a piano keyboard.

Go ahead, count 'em.

Their technology worked, and in 1942, their patent was approved. Even though the United States military didn't adopt this technology for another twenty years (I can just imagine a group of Naval officers completely picturing their idea as essentially putting an entire piano inside a torpedo [having experience with Naval officers, can confirm, their logic is not always logical]), their invention laid the groundwork for spread spectrum technology which includes wifi, bluetooth, wireless phones, and probably a billion other things that allows us to live our peaceful, knowledgeable existence today.

"You're welcome." - Hedy Lamarr, probably

So today, as you enjoy your cleverly-named wifi connection, sharing links to this blog post with everyone you've ever met (that's a thing you do now, right?), give a silent thank you to the stunning bae that had the brass to embrace her intelligence and change the world.

#goals