Hedy Lamarr: Google Doodle celebrates 101st birthday of actress and inventor

She was a beauty who made her name by appearing nude in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, but she didn’t necessarily hold that particular quality in high regard. After the movie, she fled to Paris where she was offered a movie contract in Hollywood with MGM and her journey in continued from 1930s to 1950s. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine.

Her other films include an adaptation of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah” and “The Female Animal“. But she grew tired of femme fatale roles that didn’t showcase her intelligence.

According to Rhodes, Lamarr had one room set aside in her home with a drafting table, bright lights, and a whole wall of engineering reference books. “How could that be improved?'”, Rhodes says. Lamarr later turned her attention to inventing after becoming bored with acting, and tried to help the Allies win World War II both with her inventions and through fundraising efforts. “She was very complicated and very accomplished at the same time”.

The patent discussed a design to provide jamming-free radio-guidance systems for submarine-launched torpedoes based on the frequency-hopping spread spectrum technique.

However, Ms Lamarr was not just a pretty face.

She shared her designs with avant-garde composer George Antheil at a dinner party one evening. (A piano keyboard has 88 frequencies). That invention was way ahead of it’s time, but would eventually come to form the basis of wireless communication.

Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. They then gave it, free of charge, to the US Navy, which promptly shelved it.

A page from Hedy (Lamarr) Markey’s 1942 patent for a frequency-hopping system.

She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

“She’s just so cool”, said Jennifer Hom of Google, who researched Lamarr’s life to create the animated clip.

Google’s homepage on 9 November was not only decorated with a musical doodle, but also contained a story of Hollywood star Lamarr’s 101st birthday. In a nod to her Hollywood career, it is in a movie format, and attempts to capture the look and feel of 1940s fashion illustrations and film posters.