November 9th would have been Hedy Lamarr’s 100th birthday. If you weren’t aware, in addition to her acting career, Lamarr also helped invent frequency-hopping spread-spectrum signalling to prevent frequency jams of communications between submarines and torpedoes.

Lamarr was born in Austria in 1914. Her first husband, a munitions manufacturer, would take her to business lectures, where she learned the applied science of weapons and communications technology. After moving to the US and becoming an actress, Lamarr met George Antheil, an avant garde composer. During WWII, the two developed frequency hopping as a method of preventing communication jams by opposing forces. A piano roll, based on the 88 keys of a piano, was used to seemingly randomly jump the frequency of a message. Only the sender and receiver, who knew the sequence of hops in advance, could translate the message. Opposing forces couldn’t just attempt to jam every signal either, since there were too many possible hops.

Although the patent was filed in 1942, the US armed forces did not use the technology until 1962, after the patent expired. Nowadays, we can see the evolution of the Lamarr-Antheil invention in bluetooth devices and some types of wireless internet routers, which use communication technology based on Lamarr’s ideas. So if you ever you ever watch one of her movies on Netflix, remember that she helped to get that film to your computer in more ways than one.

Article written by R. Eaton. Information sourced from Wikipedia.