Hedy Lamarr
Movie star + frequency hopping
Austrian-American actress and inventor (1914-2000).
By day, a Golden Age Hollywood leading lady — 'the most beautiful woman in film.' By night, a self-taught inventor: with composer George Antheil she co-invented a frequency-hopping signal system in 1942 meant to keep WWII torpedo guidance jam-proof. The patent gathered dust for decades, then resurfaced as a building block of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS.
Famous for
- Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (patent 1942)
- Foundation tech for Bluetooth + Wi-Fi
- Algiers + Samson and Delilah
- First female inventor inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
In Rubicon
Hedy Lamarr is one of the historical characters you can play as in Rubicon, a trivia game where you answer in your own words and an AI judge reads what you meant. Hedy Lamarr is filed under Technology & Engineering, and is strongest at Technology & Engineering and Arts & Culture.
Others in Technology & Engineering
- Nikola Tesla — Alternating current + wireless dreams
- Alexander Graham Bell — Invented the telephone
- Alan Turing — Father of computer science
- Archimedes of Syracuse — Eureka! + war machines
- Ada Lovelace — First computer programmer
- Charles Babbage — Father of the computer