Hedy was a 26 year old thriving Hollywood star, when in mid September of 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Numerous children drowned. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, was horrified, and decided to fight back, but in an unusual way. She sat down at a drafting table at home and drew out a revolutionary radio guidance system for anti-submarine torpedoes.
Many considered Hedy Lamarr a genius. As a young child, Hedy accompanied her banker father everywhere, absorbing his detailed explanations of how streetcars and other modern marvels worked. He love was acting, which she pursued instead of a technical career. A bad marriage at a young age left her trapped, from which she was able to escape. She came to the United States, where she teamed up with musician and composer George Antheil, who also had an aptitude for machines.
Many of the ideas that Lamarr brought to the collabaration were gathered from her father-in-law in Austria. She collected loads of classified intelligence, which she later used with Antheil to develop a radio system where sender and receiver could communicate without fear of jamming. (It was a frequency hopping system). In the end, the system they invented was too sophisticated to incorporate into the clumsy torpedoes the United States deployed during the war. Their invention is considered the forerunner of GPS, Wi-Fi, cell phones and Bluetooth.!
Lamarr did a great deal to help the war effort. She sold war bonds, raising over $25 million ($340 million today). In later life Lamarr felt cheated of credit for her developments. She is called an inventive genius by Richard Rhodes, author of Hedy's Folly. A great beauty, and a great brain. This combination lead Hedy to a life of artistic accomplishment in film and theatre, and mechanical invention in the world of science.
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