History Column: Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, 1914, in Vienna, Austria) is best known as a Hollywood actress of the 1940s and 1950s. Less well known is the fact that she was also a talented and innovative inventor. In 1942, she and avant-garde musician and inventor George Antheil developed and patented a communications scheme for use in a radio guidance system for torpedoes. The key novelty was that this exploited frequency-hopping both so as not be discovered by an opponent and as a counter to jamming, and this may be considered as a forerunner of spread-spectrum techniques which are now widely used in secure communications. The author notes sources for further reseach.