Guest Post by Kate Jakubowski
Born in Vienna in 1914, Lamarr was fascinated from a young
age by how things worked. Her father inspired young Hedy when he took her on
walks around Vienna and explained the mechanisms of everyday objects such as
trolleys.[2]
Taking apart a music box at the age of 5 to understand how it worked, Lamarr eventually
went on to invent an Alka-Seltzer-like soda cube, an improved traffic light,
and the technology that eventually enabled Bluetooth.[3]
But as the story too often goes for brilliant women, Lamarr was discouraged and
even undermined for wanting to invent. When she submitted her patent for the
Secret Communications System to the Navy, it was swiftly rejected.[4]
Even worse, when she volunteered to quit her acting career in order to work on
the invention, they told her she’d be better off selling war bonds because she
was a pretty face that everyone knew.[5]
People focused on just that—her looks, never taking the insightful, intelligent
woman into account. A deeper dive into the concept of creativity itself shows
why Lamarr was a creative genius and how her legacy still endures today.
While there are many, many
definitions of what constitutes creativity, its most basic definition is as
the ability to form original ideas using the imagination. Although there are no strict quantitative means of measuring this
unique phenomenon, there are other methods to go about assessing creativity,
most easily through qualitative observation. In his book Creativity: The Flow
of Discovery, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that creative
people are able to harness opposing characteristics in a trait he calls complexity.[6]
So, while some people might be introverted or extroverted, Csikszentmihalyi explains that creative
people are able to be both.[7]
There is no better example of complexity than Hedy Lamarr. Her
inventing partner George Antheil once described Lamarr as “an incredible
combination of childish ignorance and stupidity—and definite flashes of
genius.”[8]
By many accounts, Lamarr could speak three or four languages but only write phonetically.[9]
Furthermore, while extroversion is often associated with acting, Antheil also
described Lamarr as a classic introvert: “Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays
home at night and invents!”[10]
Another example of Lamarr showing complexity is that of the opposing traits
of imagination and reality. The inspiration for the Secret Communications
System came from surprising sources—but shows how the best ideas are those born
from an active imagination.
Creativity involves turning ideas into reality—it’s the
ability to make something new out of what already exists. Creativity takes hard
work, dedication, and a brilliant mind—and Hedy Lamarr shows us just that with
her incredible story. There are multiple versions of how Lamarr invented the
technology that enabled Bluetooth, but the most widely accepted account
involves German torpedoes and a remote-controlled radio.[11]
At the height of World War II, German U-boats were sinking ships carrying children
from the Allied countries, which devastated Lamarr.[12]
She realized that the Germans were able to “jam” the radio signals in order to
find the other boats, and this led her to devise a plan for a remote-controlled
torpedo.[13]
She became inspired by her PhilCo radio, which was itself controlled by a
remote, and realized that the frequencies could “hop” back and forth. Lamarr’s
mind brought these two events together and, with a little practical help from pianist
and avant-garde composer George Antheil, the Secret Communications System was
born. It was named after the fact that the signal couldn’t be jammed like the
technology at the time. Although the idea was originally conceived for warfare,
the resulting technology had a much more positive result. Lamarr and Antheil’s collaboration
produced the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), which has since been
implemented in Bluetooth and WiFi technologies, both of which countless populations
rely upon today. This shows imagination meeting reality at its very finest, as Lamarr
devised an invention using existing elements in an entirely new way. Even while
working on films such as Ziegfeld Girl and Tortilla Flat, Hedy
Lamarr found time to work on her true passion in life. While Antheil became
discouraged from inventing after the Navy rejected their patent for the Secret
Communications System, Lamarr never gave up, showing that persistence is
another key trait to those who are creative geniuses.
Besides complexity and persistence, there is much more to
the creative process—it is a complex idea itself. In his essay Toward a
Definition of Creativity, Richard J. Penaskovic explains the necessary
conditions for creativity to flourish:[14]
1. “Highly developed mental skills so that the information
previously acquired may be put together in a new way”
2. “Breadth and depth of knowledge”
3. “Intense personal involvement with and commitment to the
problem...creative persons have a passion for what they do”
4. “The ability to get lost in the here and now”
These traits were evident in Lamarr and her approach to
devising a groundbreaking invention. Inventor Carmelo “Nino” Amarena takes it a
step further when describing the inventive process: “the inventive process
follows a cascade of ideas and thoughts interconnected from previous concepts
that for the most part lie separatee, unconnected and unrelated. It takes a
clear state of mind, which is usually someone thinking ‘outside the box’ to suddenly
or serendipitously see the connection between the unrelated concepts and put it
all together to create something new.”[15]
Hedy Lamarr was able to put two separate ideas together and turn them into
something the world had never seen. Her idea of “frequency hopping” was
groundbreaking; but unfortunately, the world was too focused on her life in the
tabloids to see the creative genius Lamarr really was. Although she may have
been making successful movies such as Comrade X and Crossroads,
her acting career came second. Her true passion was inventing, and it showed
with her dedication to the Secret Communications System. Lamarr may be most
well-known for her portrayal of Delilah in Samson and Delilah, but there
is no doubt her legacy as a brilliant inventor endures.
Unlike the movies she mostly starred in, Lamarr’s life had anything
but a fairytale ending. Her last film The Female Animal, came out in 1958,
at the tail-end of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Soon after, she became a
punchline in the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles, where she was
parodied as Hedley Lamarr. She sued Warner Brothers for infringing on her
privacy but lost; other lawsuits would follow but sadly had the same outcome.[16]
The Navy began implementing the technology she invented in the 1950s; however, Lamarr
herself was never given compensation for her invention due to some legal
loophole in patent law.[17]
After six divorces and a movie career cut short, the rest of Lamarr’s life was fraught
with many financial troubles. She died shortly after the new millennium on
January 19, 2000—however, not before she got some long-overdue credit for her revolutionary
invention. She and Antheil (posthumously) both received the Electric Frontier Foundation's
Pioneer Award—marking the first time she was recognized for pioneering FHSS.[18]
While Hedy Lamarr was misunderstood throughout her lifetime,
today we are finally seeing a full portrait of the brilliant woman. Lamarr was
creative, complex, passionate and talented. More importantly, Hedy Lamarr never
gave up on her greatest work and continued to invent for the rest of her life. Creativity
takes an unstinted amount of perseverance, dedication, and curiosity, and those
who possess these traits are capable of amazing things. Lamarr was known for
her work on the screen—but behind the scenes was a brilliant woman who
continued to persevere despite setbacks. When asked in an interview, Carmelo
Amarena said this of her: “I never felt I was talking to a movie star, but to a
fellow inventor.”[19]
Although Lamarr may have passed away before her life’s work was truly
recognized, there is solace in knowing her legacy lives on and improves everyday
life. Perhaps during her days, she was known for being an actress—but as Lamarr
said herself, “all creative people want to do the unexpected.”[20]
And that’s exactly what she did.
[1]
“Hedy Lamarr Quotes,” BrainyQuote, accessed January 17, 2022, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/hedy_lamarr_100500.
[2] Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,
directed by Alexandra Dean (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2017).
[3] Bombshell, 2017.
[4] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 185.
[5] Bombshell, 2017.
[6] Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity:
Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York:
Harper/Collins, 1996), 57.
[7] Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity,
65.
[8] Richard Rhodes, Hedy's Folly:
The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman
in the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 166.
[9] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 166.
[10] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 138.
[11] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 129-132 & 143-144.
[12] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly,
129-132.
[13] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 142.
[14] Diana MacIntyre DeLuca, Essays on Creativity and
Science: Papers Delivered at a Conference Held in Honolulu, Hawaii, March
23-24, 1985 (Honolulu, HI: Hawaii Council of Teachers of English, 1986),
107-108.
[15] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 146-147.
[16] Bombshell, 2017.
[17] Bombshell, 2017.
[18] “Hedy Lamarr,” Florida Inventors
Hall of Fame, April 27, 2021, https://floridainvents.org/hedy-lamarr/.
[19] Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly, 142.
[20] “Hedy Lamarr Quotes,” BrainyQuote,
accessed January 17, 2022, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/hedy_lamarr_271434.
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hedy_Lamarr_Publicity_Photo_for_The_Heavenly_Body_1944.jpg
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