発展テクノロジー

The Actress Who Held a Patent

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In the 1930s and 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was one of the best known faces in Hollywood. Newspapers wrote about her beauty far more often than about anything she said, and the studios gave her roles that required little more than her presence. What few people knew was that she spent much of her free time at a table in her house covered with tools and drawings. Acting, she once remarked, was not particularly difficult; inventing was what genuinely interested her, and she kept at it for most of her life. She was born in Vienna in 1914. As a child she walked through the city with her father, a bank manager, who explained to her how streetcars and printing presses worked. At the age of nineteen she married a of weapons. She disliked the marriage and left it a few years later, but during that time she sat through long dinners at which engineers and officers discussed the of torpedoes, and she remembered a great of what she heard. In Hollywood she met George Antheil, a composer who had written music for machines that had to play together in time. Ships guided torpedoes by radio, but an could find the and block it. Lamarr and Antheil designed a system in which the sender and the receiver would change frequencies together in a fixed , jumping so often that the could not easily be blocked. They received a patent in 1942, but the navy did not make use of it. The idea was largely forgotten for decades. Only later, when engineers were looking for ways to let many devices the air without interfering with one another, did methods become , and they now lie behind technologies used every day. Lamarr received almost no money from the patent, which had expired long before. She was honored for her work in the 1990s, a few years before her death, when she was in her eighties. Today her name is attached to an for young inventors, and her story is often told in schools as an of that went unnoticed for far too long.