Iconic Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr, was known in her lifetime for her sultry beauty and the scandal she created by appearing nude in a romantic film at the age of 18.

Since her death in 2000, another side to the Austrian-born star has emerged - as a brilliant inventor who helped create the technology used in modern wireless communication. Yet her scientific skills in inventing a successful guidance system for radio-controlled missiles during the Second World War weren't recognised until more than half a century later.

Pin-up girl

Despite her role in creating the technology that led to Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth, military chiefs believed Lamarr made a greater contribution to the war effort by boosting morale as a pin-up girl.

At the time, she was a major Hollywood star, with several box office hits under her belt, such as Boom Town in 1940 with Clark Gable, which made $5 million at the box office.

Despite the press revealing her ground-breaking invention at the time, the public was more interested in reading scandal about the actress, who was married and divorced six times. Her invention was forgotten and in 1944, an article in Motion Picture Magazine jokingly referred to her as having invented a "new head-dress".

It wasn't until the late 1990s, when Lamarr was in her 80s, that her invention became widely known and, subsequently, she was hailed as one of the most talented and inspirational women of the 20th century.

Acting career

Lamarr was born in Vienna in November 1914 to her bank director father Emil and pianist mother Gertrud. As a child, she was fascinated by silent movies and began taking acting classes.

As a teenager, she forged a letter from her mother in order to find employment as a script girl at Sascha-Filmindustrie AG, better known as Sascha-Film - the largest movie company in Austria at the time.

This led to her first acting role as an extra in the 1930 film, Money on the Street, when she was 16 years old. Her first speaking role was in Storm in a Water Glass in 1931 - a comedy in which she played a secretary.

Scandal

She shot to international stardom when she appeared in the romantic drama, Ecstasy, in 1933, at the age of 18. She played a young woman who divorced her older husband after he showed no interest in her and refused to consummate their marriage. He committed suicide after finding out she was romantically involved with a young construction worker.

The film was considered scandalous because Lamarr's character went swimming in the nude and also because of scenes in the bedroom with her co-star, German actor Aribert Mog, who played her lover. It led to Lamarr's international notoriety and was banned in the United States for being obscene.

Soon afterwards, she married Austrian munitions manufacturer Friedrich Mandl, while still only 18. He was 33 years old and reportedly objected to her appearance in Ecstasy, refusing to allow her to pursue her acting career.

Hollywood years

The marriage ended in 1937 when Lamarr fled to Paris, claiming it had been like a "prison" being married to Mandl. She met the head of MGM studios, Louis B Mayer, in London and he offered her a $500 a week deal.

This was the beginning of her hugely successful Hollywood film career, starring in classic movies such as Ziegfeld Girl in 1941, in which she played a showgirl opposite James Stewart. In White Cargo in 1942, she played her now familiar role as a seductress and in the 1944 comedy, The Heavenly Body, she portrayed the beautiful wife of an astronomer, William Powell.

Although the reviews praised her acting skills and said her "beauty took your breath away", in her autobiography, she revealed the lack of acting challenges bored her.

Inventor

Although her screen persona was that of a glamorous, confident and happy young woman, in her private life, she felt lonely and was homesick for Austria. Following her divorce from Mandl in 1937, she married and divorced a further five times between 1939 and 1965. Ironically, her final marriage in 1963 was to her divorce lawyer, Lewis Boies.

The press embraced this side of the actress. This was one of the reasons why her important career as an inventor was never given the recognition it deserved at the time. Although she had no formal training in science, she once claimed inventions "came naturally".

Among her early inventions was a new type of traffic light and also a tablet to create a cola-like carbonated drink from water. However, neither of these was a commercial success.

Aviation tycoon Howard Hughes was aware of Lamarr's inventive side and, at her suggestion, he changed the rather staid square design of his aircraft into more streamlined creations.

Radio-controlled torpedoes

During the Second World War, Lamarr was interested in reading about the manufacture of radio-controlled torpedoes - a new technology being used by the navy. She learned how it was too easy for the enemy to jam the signal and send them off course.

Staying up all night at home, Lamarr practiced her favourite hobby, inventing, thinking up the idea of a frequency-hopping signal that couldn't be jammed or tracked. She asked her friend, pianist and composer George Antheil, to help her develop a device to achieve this aim. They succeeded by synchronising a miniature piano-playing mechanism with radio signals and drafted a design for their frequency-hopping system using this technology.

Recalling the birth of their invention, she said at the time, the Allied efforts were not going well and she felt uncomfortable sitting around in Hollywood when she felt she could be doing more for the war effort.

She was seriously considering quitting Hollywood and instead going to Washington DC to work for the new Inventors' Council, as she had amassed a great deal of knowledge about munitions and weapons.

Their invention of the frequency-hopping signal was granted a US Patent on 11th August 1942, under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey. However, at the time, the US Navy was not keen on inventions that came from outside the military and felt the technology required would be hard to implement.

As a result, the invention wasn't taken up by the navy during the Second World War.

Later life

Despite Lamarr's scientific triumph receiving a mention in the LA Times, after the Inventors' Council released details, the fascinating story soon vanished without a trace.

The article had described Lamarr as a "screen siren and inventor", saying her "secret" invention had "great potential in the national defence programme", but her image as a beautiful leading lady, playing the role of a seductress, was far more popular than her new persona as a scientist.

In later life, she became enraged by the ghost-writer of her memoirs, claiming her life story had been made "false, vulgar, libellous and obscene". It was a constant source of anger that her screen persona overshadowed her natural brilliance as an inventor.

Recognition

In 1962, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Lamarr's invention finally came to light, when an updated version first appeared on US Navy ships.

Her role in the invention wasn't officially recognised for another 35 years, however. In 1997, when Lamarr was 83, she and Antheil received the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.

These honours are bestowed on people whose creative lifetime achievements in science, the arts, invention and business have made a significant contribution to society. Lamarr's inventions were highlighted on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel.

Some years after her death in January 2000, Lamarr and Antheil were both posthumously inducted into the National Inventors' Hall of Fame in 2014.

Hydraulics and missiles

In 1942, when Lamarr's invention was patented, the guided missile had just been recognised as a realistic military weapon. Hydraulics had long been an established factor in commercial aircraft design. Its power was used to operate landing flaps, brakes, landing gear, turret drives, shock struts, propeller pitch controls, autopilots and similar assemblies.

The new fields of the guided missile and supersonic aircraft put further demands on the hydraulics industry to produce unprecedented performances to satisfy the latest designs and applications. It was reported at the time that the stringent considerations that the design criteria imposed on the missile equipment was taxing the designers' ingenuity.

The missile's control surfaces were operated by individual hydraulic servos. Electrically-driven gear pumps were totally submerged in the oil sump to prevent air pockets from forming and to decrease the line length to a minimum. This developed the system pressure.

Pump and servo units were installed directly into the tail fins. Precision was the keyword, since most missiles were limited for space, regardless of the equipment being used.

Contemporary missile designs of the 1940s required various applications of hydraulic equipment to operate the control surfaces and to deliver fuel. The liquids pumped through included liquid oxygen, alcohol, oil, hydrogen peroxide and other fuels and oxidisers.

The fact that a Hollywood screen siren such as Lamarr knew so much about missiles and warfare didn't sit easily with studio bosses, in an era when female stars were categorised as simply "beautiful". An actress who was both beautiful and highly intelligent was seen as somehow threatening.

In the male-dominated Hollywood environment of the 1940s, Lamarr was valued only for her physicality and not for her abilities - a fact which the star came to resent.

Phoenix Hydraulics is one of the largest independent hydraulics companies in the UK, providing specialist hydraulic engineering solutions and hydraulic components for various sectors and applications. Give us a call on 01733 234800 for details of our products and services.