Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World Who Dreamed of Inventing

There is an image of Hedy Lamarr that Hollywood magazines repeated more often than any other: her face lit for the cameras, the caption crowning her the most beautiful woman in the world. That photograph travelled through the decades, yet it always hid the other half of her life: the nights spent bent over a drawing table, sheets covered in diagrams and calculations, while the world saw only a face.

As a child in Vienna, Hedy used to take objects apart to understand how they worked. A music box, in particular, obsessed her for days: she opened it, studied every gear, and put it back together herself, purely for the pleasure of knowing what made it play. Her father, who worked in a bank but loved mechanics as much as she did, took her on walks around the city, explaining how trams and newspapers came into being. It was probably there that she learned to look at the world as a mechanism to be understood, not merely admired.

She grew up beautiful, and the world hastened to reduce her to that. She left Austria and a marriage that suffocated her, arriving in Hollywood with a new name and a career to build from nothing. She became one of the most desired actresses in American cinema, the face of films still watched today. And while the spotlight turned her into an icon, she carried on thinking like an engineer, quietly, almost in secret.

The war brought a problem that touched her directly: Allied torpedoes travelled on a single radio frequency, easy for the enemy to intercept and jam. Hedy set about studying it with the same stubbornness with which, as a child, she had taken music boxes apart. She found an unexpected ally in George Antheil, a composer who understood the workings of player pianos inside out, and together they devised a way to make the radio signal hop from one frequency to another, synchronised and unpredictable, so fast that intercepting it became almost impossible.

Their system was patented, but the US Navy left it shut in a drawer for years, never putting it to use while she was alive. Hedy never saw a penny for her invention, and spent much of her life without the recognition she deserved. Only much later, when she could no longer know it, did the principle behind her patent resurface: frequency-hopping spread spectrum became the foundation of technologies we now take for granted every day, from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth, right through to GPS.

Hedy Lamarr died perhaps believing that no one would ever know what lay behind her most photographed face. Only after her death did the world begin to call her what she truly was: an inventor, before she was ever an actress. One wonders how many other stories like hers still lie hidden behind a label that seems to say everything about a person, yet says almost nothing.

Hedy Lamarr's story is one of those told in The Great Heroes collection, for children curious to discover what lies behind a famous face.