The secret life of the most beautiful woman of her time

This stunningly beautiful woman was, in the early 1940s, the queen of American cinema:

Her name is Hedy Lamarr.

She gave the answer to the biggest stars: Clark Gable, James Stewart, Charles Boyer, Spencer Tracy.

The starlets of the time wore their hair and make-up like her, in the hope of breaking into the cinema in turn.

She married six times and divorced six times; his loves made the "one" of the Hollywood equivalents of Here and Paris Match every week.

Then her career declined and Hedy Lamarr was forgotten.

This oversight is a great injustice.

Because "the most beautiful woman in the world" was also a genius inventor. And his journey seems to me an incredible life lesson, for you as for me.

The origins of Wi-Fi: a brilliant idea to fight Nazi Germany

Did you know that the technology of Wi-Fi, mobile networks and GPS dates from the beginning of the Second World War?

It is to Hedy Lamarr that we owe it, in large part.

Unlike other Hollywood stars, once her filming day was over, Hedy didn't spend her evenings in clubs.

She locked herself in the little laboratory she had set up at home and she invented.

She thus developed, with a pianist friend (!) a transmission system called “spreading the spectrum by frequency hopping”.

Its purpose was to fight off Nazi submarines, which wreaked havoc by torpedoing Allied ships.

Hedy Lamarr tried to develop an inviolable system for remote guidance of American torpedoes.

The patent for his invention was registered in 1942. It is called “Secret Communication System”[1].

The principle was to constantly change frequency, in a synchronized way, between the transmitter (which controls the torpedo) and the receiver (the torpedo), and thus to make the trajectory of the torpedoes undetectable.

It rots in a drawer for twenty years

Unfortunately, when the actress went to offer the US Navy free access to her patent… we laughed in her face:

“You better support the war effort with your sex appeal,” he is told.

This is what Hedy Lamarr did, traveling the country and raising a lot of money for the benefit of the American army.

His invention landed in a drawer and was classified as "secret-defense".

An army engineer brought it out twenty years later, and applied it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then the Vietnam War.

Hedy Lamarr's invention then passed into the civilian world and became the basis of a technology that would give Wi-Fi, satellite communication, Bluetooth… without her ever knowing anything about it and… without her receives a single penny of the thirty billion dollars at which it is estimated today!

Too beautiful to be awesome

US military machismo toward Hedy Lamarr is typical.

It was unthinkable, for them, to be a sexy star AND a great scientific mind.

The aggravating fact was that Hedy Lamarr was a scandal. Woman to men, her fame was inseparable from her first film, shot in Austria in the 1930s, Ecstasy, in which she appeared naked.

Fortunately, the military engineer I told you about earlier one day publicly acknowledged what he owed the forgotten star.

Hedy Lamarr was honored as a pioneer of electronics at an American public ceremony in 1997… more than half a century after her invention and three years before her death.

Since 2014, she has been in the prestigious "Hall of Fame" of inventors around the world.

Why am I telling you this story?

I am fascinated by those geniuses who were "right too soon", like Galileo.

But what touches me above all, with Hedy Lamarr, is that she was not a “professional” inventor.

It was someone like you and me.

She had a passion and she simply “got into it”.

She gave herself a mission day after day, selflessly, learning everything on her own, with the aim of being useful to others and in harmony with herself, and it worked.

This task that we give ourselves every day, the centenarians of the island of Okinawa that I know well, call it Ikigai. I will be led to speak to you again about this concept which changed my life.

Already remember this great principle of Ikigai: find your way, give yourself a goal, however small, dig your furrow and do not be discouraged, even when the whole world seems to be leagued against you.

And you will see that time will reward you, as history has proven beautiful Hedy right.