Why do we love Hedy?
Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Hedy began studying acting as a teenager in Austria. She quickly began making films, including the notorious Czech film, Ecstasy. The film, in which a 17-year old Hedy appeared nude in a ten-minute swimming scene was banned in the U.S. for years, but it made Hedy an international star. Her dreams were put on hold a couple years later as her parents married her off to a wealthy, unscrupulous, middle-aged armament manufacturer. He regularly had dealings with Hitler and Mussolini, and the young trophy wife spent many dinners with these notorious men, absorbing their conversations. Trapped in a gilded cage (she lived in the Salzburg castle where The Sound of Music would later be filmed), Hedy tried several times to escape her controlling husband. She eventually succeeded by drugging him and making her way to London, and then Hollywood. Signing a contract with MGM on the ship from England (and getting a new name in the process), Hedy was quickly dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world" by the publicity machine, and her silver-screen career began. She starred in such films as Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Boom Town (1940), and Algiers (1938). However, her greatest achievement had nothing to do with acting.
The woman who had learned about the latest in German and Austrian technology at her husband's plants met composer George Antheil at a dinner party in 1940 and shared with him what she knew about the design of remote-controlled torpedoes, which were vulnerable to detection and jamming. Hedy believed the solution was to broadcast the weapon's signals on rapidly changing frequencies. She and Antheil developed a frequency-hopping system by which both the transmitting and receiving stations of a remote-control torpedo changed at intervals. They received a U.S. Patent in August 1942, and their research was put to limited use by the U.S. Navy during World War II. Hedy did not ask for anything for their use of her work. The patent she and Antheil received for their invention, which would come to be called spread-spectrum technology, is now the basis for practically all common wireless communications, including cellular and cordless phones.
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Biography:
Born - November 9, 1913
Vienna, Austria
Died - January 19, 2000
Altamonte, Florida
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