Once known as the “most beautiful woman in the world,” film star Hedy Lamarr also received a patent in 1942 for a “secret communications system” to safeguard U.S. torpedos from German radio jamming. The technology was the forerunner of “spread spectrum" which is now used in GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi. She was recently inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, an award accepted by her son Anthony Loder, who talks about her life’s triumphs and sorrows.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:36

What do Hollywood, the German Navy, And the Cuban missile crisis have to do with each other? Turns out they're all linked by one person. Hedy Lamarr known in the 1930s and 1940s as the world's most beautiful woman and recently inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Welcome to Radio Cade, I'm your host Richard Miles today. My guest is Anthony Loder , the son of Hedy Lamarr. Welcome to the show, Anthony, and congratulations.

Anthony Loder: 1:00

Thank you very much.

Richard Miles: 1:01

So Anthony, your mother was both a famous actress and an inventor, and I'd like to talk about the actress part, but I'd like to begin actually with the scientist part, many people do not know, although recently it's become more public through books and movies and documentaries that she was a scientist and an inventor. So why don't we start and talk about what her invention was or what her patent was and what it's been used for and so on.

Anthony Loder: 1:25

So Hitler invaded, Austria Hedy's Homeland, and she grew up very happy there. And she had to flee because of all the negativity that was surrounding her. So she actually dressed up like the maid, escaped her possessive husband and left Vienna for Paris and then Paris for London. And then she bought a ticket on the Normandy to go to New York where she met Louis B. Mayer , who was in Europe, looking for fresh talent, fresh meat, for his stables, for his race horses back in Hollywood. And Hedy became a race horse, and she had to run fast in order to keep on board. And when she started, her look started to fade, they kind of threw her out. But early on when she was there, World War II was raging. And she always knew about munitions and problems with radio guided torpedoes because she was with her husband who sold munitions to the Germans. And she always knew about this problem about radio guided torpedoes, and it always stuck with her. And she always wanted to help defeat Hitler and help the allies and United States win the war. She was very patriotic. She loved America. She loved being safe. She loved being in tropical Hollywood and she wanted to pay back. So she always thought about what can I do to help win this war? And then she at home and she probably thought of frequency hopping because she had one of these Philco magic radios where you turn the dial on your Philco magic dialer. And it changed the radio station on the radio in the next room. So she , well look, I'm changing radio frequencies constantly here. What if we send a signal to a torpedo and not send it on one frequency, but send it on multiple frequencies in sync with each other. So only the transmitter