by KYW's Dr. Marciene Mattleman

If the name Hedy Lamarr doesn’t mean anything to you, ask your mother. The notorious beauty was a movie queen who starred in films and graced the covers of many magazines. 

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Austria, and walking away from an unhappy marriage to an Austrian Fascist weapons manufacturer in 1937, she became passionate about helping the US military efforts in World War II, using the information she learned in her husband’s business.

In 1940 she worked with a partner realizing that transmitting radio signals along rapidly changing or “hopping” frequencies, American radio-guided weapons would be far more resilient to detection. No enemy “jammer” could detect messages and no code-breaker could decipher the random code.

Her ideas were first ignored; but later used by the military in the Cuban missile crisis and since have been developed in wireless technologies like cell phones. In 1997, she was honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first woman to receive its Grass Spirit of Achievement Award.

Who would have believed you could find her now in the June edition of the Scientific American.