Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Prague Post- Hedy Lamarr and Google Doodle

Hedy Lamarr honored with Google Doodle

Category: Cinema

Published: 09 November 2015

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Image of Hedy Lamarr from the Google Doodle.

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Actress appeared in a nude scene in 1933 Czechoslovak film but also helped invent WiFi

If you use WiFi or Bluetooth, you should thank Austrian-born Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, who was also a part-time scientist. She and her avant-garde composer friend, George Antheil, helped develop the principles of WiFi back in World War II as a way to guide radio-controlled torpedoes and evade enemy jamming by frequency hopping.

Her invention was ignored at the time but she was belatedly inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Many people speculate that the invention was rejected because nobody at that time was willing to take a woman, especially an actress, seriously as an armaments inventor.

She also dabbled in improving street light coordination and making tablets for instant carbonated beverages.

Google Doodles, the cartoonish image on the search engines front page, is marking the actress / scientist’s 101^stbirthday, and the doodle can be seen in much of the world except Mexico and some parts of Africa, Cambodia (which has its own for independence day) and the Middle East.

The doodle isn’t just a static logo, but a one minute sixteen second animation that shows both her artistic and lesser-known intellectual sides.

Her connection to the Czech Republic comes from her film career. She was known for being in an influential nude scene in a mainstream film. The outdoor scenes for Extasy were shot in and around Prague by director Gustav Machatý. Studio scenes were shot in Vienna. Hedy then went by the screen name Hedy Kiesler.

While often cited as the first-ever nude scene in a non-pornographic film, that is debatable. The film does have the first true sex scene depicting a female orgasm. Lamarr claims that the scene was simulated using method acting. She was 18 when the film was made.

The film was shot in Czech, German and French versions, as dubbing foreign language versions wasn’t done at that time. It was released in 1933.

Extasy was one of the first films to be condemned in the United States by the Catholic Legion of Decency and was not seen there until 1940, when it played at some independent cinemas without approval of the Hays Office, which oversaw films at the time.

Lamarr, shortly after the film came out, married a wealthy military industrialist who tried to buy up all copies of the film. The marriage did not last.

Like much European film talent of her era, she left Europe before World War II and went to Hollywood. She also changed her name at the behest of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer. The name change was an effort to make a new image for her, and break away from her being known as the Extasy girl.

“We love highlighting the many good stories about women’s achievements in science and technology. When the story involves a 1940s Hollywood star-turned-inventor who helped develop technologies we all use with our smartphones today… well, we just have to share it with the world,” Google Doodle designer Jennifer Hom said on the Google page for doodles.

“Today on Google’s homepage we’re celebrating Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress Hollywood once dubbed ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ … She had some background in military munitions (yes, really), and together with a composer friend, George Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked (yep, pianos) to identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio signals. The patent for ‘frequency hopping’ Lamarr co-authored laid the groundwork for widely-used technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi that we rely upon daily,” the description states, before adding more specific details about the animation and its influences from illustrations and movie posters.