Character Catalog

Co-invented with George Antheil, this frequency-hopping system forms the theoretical basis of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and CDMA. It is Hedy Lamarr's most influential work, even though its significance was not recognized until half a century after it was filed.

Her first major Hollywood role, alongside Charles Boyer, earned her immediate international recognition. This film definitively launched the Hedy Lamarr myth around the world.

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, this biblical epic was a colossal commercial triumph. Hedy Lamarr portrayed Delilah with a dramatic intensity that remained etched in Hollywood's collective memory.

A Czechoslovak film by Gustav Machatý that caused a worldwide scandal. Although she regretted it for the rest of her life, the film brought her early notoriety that attracted the attention of American producers.

Memoirs in which Hedy Lamarr describes her life with a candor rare for the time. She immediately disowned the book, claiming the publishers had betrayed her confidences, and filed a lawsuit.

An adventure film starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, which was one of the year's biggest box-office successes. It marks the peak of Hedy Lamarr's Hollywood career.

A system is described for secret communication... the carrier frequency of the transmitter is caused to change or shift at intervals. The particular sequence of frequencies employed constitutes a code which, without knowledge of the code, renders the transmissions non-interceptable.

I have not been loved enough. That is certain. And what I have not found in real life, I have sought in the images on the screen.

It's about time.

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

Letters exchanged between Lamarr and Antheil documenting the conceptual development of frequency hopping, drawing an analogy with the synchronized operation of player piano rolls.

Birthplace of Hedwig Kiesler, steeped in the intellectual and artistic culture of interwar Central Europe. It was here that she developed her first passions for theater and the sciences.

The residence of her first husband Friedrich Mandl, where she was kept under constant surveillance and attended business meetings with Nazi and fascist officials, unwittingly accumulating knowledge about weaponry.

The Hollywood studio where Hedy Lamarr filmed her greatest American successes (Algiers, Samson and Delilah). It was here that her international fame was built, and where the contradiction between the glamorous actress and the inventor took shape.

The institution where patent no. 2,292,387 was filed on August 11, 1942 — the official act consecrating Hedy Lamarr as an inventor, even though its significance would not be recognized until decades later.

The city where Hedy Lamarr spent her final years in relative obscurity, before passing away in January 2000. It was there that she received visits from journalists who helped reintroduce her technological contribution to the general public.

George Antheil, a specialist in synchronized player pianos, gave Hedy Lamarr the idea of encoding frequency hops like the perforations on a piano roll. This ordinary object is the origin of the central technical metaphor in the 1942 patent.

Hedy Lamarr's invention aimed to make these devices undetectable by the enemy, by hopping the signal across 88 different frequencies. It is the concrete object that the patent sought to revolutionize.

The frequency-hopping system was designed to guide radio-controlled torpedoes without German submarines being able to jam their trajectory. This is the direct military context of the invention.

A symbol of her double life: glamorous actress under Hollywood's spotlights by day, inventor working in her workshop by night. The clapperboard illustrates the tension between Hedy Lamarr's public image and her intellectual reality.

Hedy Lamarr had set up a drafting table in her Hollywood villa and would record her invention ideas between film shoots. During the war, she also contributed to imagining an effervescent tablet to replace Coca-Cola.

An anachronistic but symbolic object: Wi-Fi technology (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth rely directly on the frequency-hopping principle patented by Hedy Lamarr in 1942. Every modern phone call owes her a technological debt.