The document is filed in the United States Patent Office under the number 2,292,387. It is eleven pages long, illustrated with schematic diagrams of oscillating circuits and perforated paper rolls, and titled, with deliberate plainness, “Secret Communication System.” The inventors listed on the cover are Hedy Kiesler Markey of Los Angeles, California, and George Antheil of Manhattan Beach, California. The application was filed on June 10, 1941. The patent was granted on August 11, 1942.
The name Hedy Kiesler Markey meant little to most readers in 1942. The name Hedy Lamarr, on the other hand, was everywhere. MGM’s publicity department had been working on that name for four years. Lamarr was the woman Esquire readers had voted the most beautiful face in the world. She was the actress who had appeared in Algiers opposite Charles Boyer, in Samson and Delilah opposite Victor Mature, and whose image had sold more war bonds than nearly any other face in Hollywood. The woman whose torpedo-guidance patent sat quietly in a government filing room was the same woman whose photograph stared from newsstands and theater marquees across the country.
The gap between those two identities — the woman the public saw and the work the public did not — is not really a mystery, though it has often been treated as one. Lamarr did not invent Wi-Fi. She did not single-handedly create Bluetooth, GPS, or the internet, though all of those claims have appeared in print. What she and Antheil actually did was develop a workable proposal for a frequency-hopping torpedo-guidance system during the Second World War: a technical idea grounded in real engineering, submitted to the government in good faith, and rejected by the Navy for reasons that have been disputed ever since. The rejection did not erase the idea. Decades later, the concept of frequency hopping became fundamental to secure military communications and, through a long chain of engineering work by many hands, contributed to the conceptual toolkit from which modern wireless systems were built.