Did you know that Hollywood star was also an inventor?

Hedy Lamarr is famous on screen. During the Second World War, however, she worked on a problem remote from the studios: how to make it more difficult to jam a communication intended to guide torpedoes?

With composer George Antheil, she designed a system based on synchronized frequency changes. Transmitter and receiver must evolve together, in order to complicate the work of an opponent who wants to disrupt the signal.

The story is sometimes shortened to make Lamarr “the inventor of Wi-Fi”. This formula erases decades of developments and contributions. His real work, however, does not need such a shortcut. A movie star and a musician came up with a technical solution in the middle of a war: that’s already enough to shake up the roles we thought we knew them.