The Screen Goddess’s Secret Patent
Apart from her star-studded film career in Hollywood, Lamarr always held a keen amateur interest in engineering invention, and during World War II she keenly sensed that the single-fixed-frequency radio control signal the Allied torpedoes then commonly used was easily intercepted and jammed by the enemy, so with the composer George Antheil, drawing on the principle of the keys jumping to switch notes in a player-piano device, she conceived the "frequency-hopping" scheme of letting the control signal keep hopping rapidly among several frequencies, and successfully patented it.
A Technical Foresight Buried for Half a Century
Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency-hopping patent, for the limits of technical conditions at the time of application, was not actually adopted by the US Navy, and this invention was thereafter long buried and forgotten, until decades later, as modern wireless communication technologies such as wireless local networks and Bluetooth appeared in turn, engineers gradually realized that the core principle these technologies relied on was of one lineage with Lamarr’s patent conception, and only in 1997 — the last years of her life — did she at last receive an award formally acknowledging this technological contribution recognized only after half a century.