Hedy Lamarr was once known as "the most beautiful woman in the world." The legendary actress graced more than 30 films, starring alongside such renowned performers as Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, and dozens of other celebrated figures from the glory days of Hollywood. At the time of her death, on Jan. 19, 2000, most remembered her this way--as the classic cinema siren.

But all too few realized that Lamarr was also a brilliant inventor whose technological legacy would continue to have an impact nearly six decades later. In 1942 Lamarr and avant-garde music composer George Antheil were awarded the patent for a device known as the "secret communication system," which they donated to the Allied war effort. At the time no one could foresee that this invention would become so important that its effects would shape the world's technological landscape well into the 21st century or that the ideas which evolved from the original concepts would spawn a billion-dollar industry.

"The Most Beautiful Woman in the World"

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on Nov. 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Emil and Gertrud Kiesler. She received a private education and learned Hungarian, Italian, English, and other languages. Her budding film career took a turn in 1932 when she starred in Ecstasy, a Czechoslovakian film directed by Gustav Machaty. Although several critics acknowledged the film's artistic intent, it was racy enough to be condemned by Pope Pius XI and caused international controversy.

Her newfound fame attracted the attention of Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions dealer who introduced her to a life of wealth and luxury, and the couple married on Aug. 10, 1933. Mandl traveled in some of the most powerful circles in Europe. He was a notoriously unscrupulous businessman who was known for selling arms to a wide range of clients, often in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Despite his reputation, Mandl was a prominent member of Viennese society, and Lamarr and her husband entertained guests who included aristocrats, industrialists, artists, and key political and military figures such as Benito Mussolini. While entertaining these guests, Lamarr heard many conversations concerning state-of-the-art weapons technology.

Early in her marriage, Lamarr would learn that Mandl was a jealous and possessive husband as well. When he traveled on business, he would keep her under what amounted to house arrest. Lamarr became a prisoner in her husband's vast estate; if she left the house, Mandl's spies would report her every movement. After four years of imprisonment, she grew weary of her husband's control, and was troubled by the darkening mood of Austria during Hitler's rise to power. While her husband was away, Lamarr disguised herself as a servant and escaped to Paris, then continued on to London. There she met Louis B. Mayer of MGM, who eventually signed her to a seven-year contract. Lamarr had escaped to the waiting arms of Hollywood and stardom.

She would go on to appear in such films as Algiers (1938), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), and Samson and Delilah (1949). Although her roles and movies were somewhat memorable, it appears that Lamarr grew more famous than the films in which she starred. Hollywood's memory of her iconic, sultry image and her fabled beauty have far outlasted the popularity of her cinematic contributions.

Despite her Hollywood success, she was once quoted as saying, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." She would consider her beauty to be a burden, the source of all her problems. Lamarr volunteered to work with the U.S. government in the war effort, by developing technologies and offering intelligence based on the extensive experience gained during her marriage to Mandl, but was instead encouraged to sell war bonds to raise money. She agreed to do so and helped sell more than $7 million in bonds, but she was always seeking an opportunity to assist the government by using her too frequently overlooked brainpower. When she met composer George Antheil in the summer of 1940, she realized that she might have found her chance.

"The Bad Boy of Music"

Although he was a classically trained composer, George Antheil was dubbed the "bad boy of music" for his "ultramodern," avant-garde style. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, and his contemporaries included the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.

His work, which Antheil himself described as "coldly mechanistic," was viewed by some as an attempt to interpret the modern, industrial age. Indeed, his compositions would reveal a technological bent. His most famous composition, Le Ballet Mécanique, was first presented in 1926 and incorporated electric bells, airplane propellers, automobile horns, and as many as 16 synchronized player pianos.

As a composer, Antheil was ahead of his time by several decades; the advent of computers and later forms of electronic music would inspire further explorations on these themes. Nonetheless, if Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was a work of art as seen from the perspective of technology, after meeting with Lamarr he would introduce an artist's interpretation of technology.

The Meeting of the Minds

Years after his time in Paris, Antheil found himself in Hollywood, composing scores for films. He was a columnist for Esquire and considered himself an amateur expert in the dubious science of "endocrine criminology"--he even wrote a book on the subject. After meeting Antheil, Lamarr believed she had found the perfect person to help her realize her ideas, and the admiration was mutual. In his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, Antheil attributes the fundamental concept of the invention to Lamarr: "Compared to most Hollywood actresses we know, Hedy is an intellectual giant." Nevertheless, Antheil's ability to use technology in novel ways proved to be just as vital to their collaboration as Lamarr's knowledge of military armaments.

During her first marriage Lamarr learned that the Germans considered the inaccuracy of torpedoes to be one of the most pressing problems in naval warfare. Strong ocean currents made the trajectory of the torpedo hard to predict, and various solutions were considered. A wire could communicate corrections to the torpedo from a ship, but in some cases the wire would need to be more than a mile long. A radio communication between the ship and the torpedo might be established, but the signal could be subject to interference from other transmissions, or worse yet, the signal could be easily picked up and jammed.

If Germany and Italy coveted this undiscovered technology, Lamarr felt that for the Allies it was all the more vital. In a 1945 article in The Stars and Stripes, she stated, "British fliers were over hostile territory as soon as they crossed the channel, but German aviators were over friendly territory most of the way to England.... I got the idea for my invention when I tried to think of some way to even the balance for the British. A radio controlled torpedo I thought would do it."

Lamarr theorized that if a radio signal could be made to jump from frequency to frequency, the signal as a whole would be undetectable and thus impossible to jam; if an enemy tried to pick up the signal, only small bits could be detected out of the entire sequence. The signal would also be able to withstand random noise or interference. She had the answer, but with one problem: How to enable the receiver (the torpedo) to use the same pattern of "frequency hopping" as the sender?

Fortunately, Antheil was the perfect choice for collaboration. Decades before electronic circuitry would allow machines to "remember" specific instructions, Antheil had already conceived of a technique that would allow the synchronization of two separate machines for his eccentric symphony, Le Ballet Mécanique, in which he synchronized 16 player pianos. In the symphony the player pianos could be made to play a particular sequence by reading identical patterns of punched holes on a paper roll.

Applying these concepts directly to Lamarr's idea, a radio-controlled torpedo would use a similar system to synchronize a sequence of frequency jumps with an air-based control station aboard an airplane flying overhead. The control station would transmit instructions to the torpedo, but rather than send the signal over a single frequency, it would send the signal over a seemingly random sequence of changing frequencies. To an outside observer monitoring a single frequency, these communications would appear as noise, but the torpedo would be equipped to receive the signal on the same complex pattern of frequency switches. Although the patent specifies that as few as 8 different frequencies would be sufficient, Antheil's roll would accommodate 88 different carrier frequencies--precisely matching the number of keys on a piano keyboard.

After many hours of refinement and consultation with an electrical engineer, Lamarr and Antheil were ready to apply for a patent. In 1942 the U.S. Patent Office granted them Patent No. 2,292,387: Secret Communication System.

The Patent

The patent itself was much more than a treatment of the key concepts; it was surprisingly detailed and thorough. Nevertheless, when Lamarr and Antheil passed the patent on to the government, it would not be used, at least not during the war. There has been much speculation as to why the invention was not recognized. Obviously, many would be quick to conclude that a stubborn military was reluctant to adopt a technology that had been developed by a pair of Hollywood celebrities, particularly a movie sex symbol. Some Naval officials would explain that the invention was too cumbersome for a torpedo, despite Antheil's insistence that the device could be made as small as a wristwatch. Indeed, Lamarr and Antheil had both speculated that the mention of player-piano style rolls in the patent may have hurt its chances of being brought into production. Were this the case, it would have been a tragically biased oversight--paper punched cards had operated machinery, in the same manner as the player-piano roll, since the 19th century.

The schematics, as drawn up by Antheil, detailed specific components and structures, and a working prototype could conceivably have been built from, or at least based on, the diagrams. However, the system, as it was conceived at the time, would have been far too impractical to try to deploy in the field on a wide basis and wasn't seen as a technology that the military should focus its efforts on developing during wartime. Putting the actual concept into general use would not be possible until the advent of transistorized electronics. In 1962 a communications system using an electronic variation on this design was developed by Sylvania and employed by the naval ships that formed the blockade during the Cuban missile crisis.

Unfortunately for Lamarr and Antheil, their patent expired in 1959; its 17-year period had elapsed just months after Antheil's death. Because the pair, in good faith, had donated their design to the government and sought no financial compensation, they never pursued further involvement in the patent. If they had tried to patent additional modifications to the invention, they could have extended the length of time during which they had the rights to the technology.

Perhaps their act of good will was naive; pursuing commercial production might have increased the chances that their design would have been developed. But more than anything else, Lamarr and Antheil had run headlong into a growing trend in technological development. Invention no longer occurred in the workshops of single, larger-than-life individuals--the days of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers were long past. In fact, Edison's success is often attributed to his shrewd business savvy and his ability to operate in the commercial world as well as to his genius.

Invention had become the domain of large commercial or institutional hierarchies, as evidenced by the development of atomic energy, aviation, the automotive industry, and many other fields. Technological development within the military itself had long since evolved into a vast bureaucratic structure in which the individual voices of Lamarr and Antheil would have been easily lost. Their philosophy had been one of patriotism and philanthropy--ironically, had their motivation been entrepreneurial, their invention might have seen the light of day, perhaps in time to aid the war effort to which they had earnestly sought to contribute.

Nevertheless, the design is recognized as the "generic patent," and from this first development many other technologies emerged. Lamarr and Antheil's design would later be seen as the first instance of spread spectrum communications: the "spread" of a radio signal over a large bandwidth in order to prevent detection and jamming. As a result, Lamarr and Antheil's original notions have become so important that even today the staggering effects of this technology have not yet been fully realized.

The Legacy of Spread Spectrum

The "Secret Communication System" was decades ahead of its time. The electronics technology that could put Lamarr and Antheil's "frequency hopping" technique to full use would not be seen for many years, and over time frequency hopping would evolve into spread spectrum technology. The U.S. government used spread spectrum at the heart of its $25-billion Milstar defense satellite network. In 1981 the military released part of their version of this technology to the FCC to be reviewed for commercial use, and in 1985 the public began to use spread spectrum technology.

Since that time, complemented by the developments in semiconductor technology, spread spectrum has made possible the rapid growth of wireless technology. Spread spectrum allows not only secure communications but can also accommodate many users over a limited range of frequencies. In essence, all users transmit and receive on their own discreet pattern, synchronized with their parent systems. As a result, this sharing of frequency can take place with little overlap or loss of signal.

In 1999 more than 150 million people were using wireless phones. Motorola, one of the leading producers of wireless communications, predicts that by 2003 there will be as many as a billion users. In some countries ground-based phone service is often cost-prohibitive and sometimes irrelevant. For younger generations wireless communications is becoming a way of life in which the personal phone replaces the home phone. This trend will surely grow as equipment and service become cheaper and better. In developing nations the proliferation of wireless communications may serve as a solution to the logistical problems of establishing a conventional telecommunications infrastructure.

The Qualcomm corporation owns the commercial rights to a form of spread spectrum called CDMA (code-division multiple access); a large part of the company's almost unparalleled success comes from royalty fees based on the licensing of this technology. Other companies, such as Nokia and Ericsson, have also flourished from the growth of wireless telecommunications. Beyond phones, many new applications have continued to emerge: wireless networking, mobile Internet access, interactive television, and countless other possibilities. In each of these applications users can be assured a high level of privacy due to the fundamental security afforded by spread spectrum.

Many patents have acknowledged Lamarr and Antheil's patent as "the generic patent." Although the patent was highly specific in its application, its functionality included a new, highly disruptive technology--what contemporary entrepreneurs might refer to as a "killer app." Unfortunately, this technology would lie dormant for decades. During their lifetimes Lamarr and Antheil never saw any payment for their work, despite the fact that they laid the groundwork for a billion-dollar industry.

In 1997, more than half a century after the original patent, the technological community would finally catch up with Lamarr and Antheil. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online privacy and rights organization, honored the pair with its Pioneer Award, an accolade recognizing individuals for their work in "expanding knowledge, freedom, efficiency, and utility." Even in 1997 the technology was only beginning to gain momentum. A fellow honoree, David Hughes, recommended Lamarr and Antheil for the award. In his nomination letter he expressed his amazement that a woman of Lamarr's day, "not operating out of a research or university center, grasped and articulated the novel technical ideas underlying spread spectrum" and remarked that in 1997 very few people even understood spread spectrum or its staggering implications on privacy.

When Lamarr died of natural causes in her home in Orlando, Florida, many reflected upon her disarming beauty, her charm and personality, and her seductive onscreen presence. Few made more than a passing mention of her contribution to the world of technology, and some overlooked it altogether. Though she was idolized as "the most beautiful woman in the world," she would have eagerly traded the trappings of a Hollywood star for the real-life role of a brilliant inventor. As Lamarr's films pass from a culture's memory and an era of Hollywood fades into history, it seems appropriate that the work of her visionary, innovative mind should be her most enduring legacy.