| Hedy Lamarr, often proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” The 26-yr-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood when, in September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down & sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. 77 drowned in the bleak north Atlantic. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, who had been making America her home since 1938, was outraged. She fought back by applying her engineering skills to development of a sonarsub-locator used in the Atlantic for the benefit of the Allies. The principles of her work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to her to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. |
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| In 1933, a beautiful, young Austrian woman took off her clothes for a movie director in the film "Ecstasy". She ran through the woods, naked. She swam in a lake, naked. The most popular movie in 1933 was "King Kong", but everyone in Hollywood was talking about that scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.
Louis B. Mayer, of the giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The film was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price. The star of the film was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of her beauty was "to stand there and look stupid." In reality, Kiesler was anything but stupid. At the time she made "Ecstasy", Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Austria, Friedrich Mandl - Austria's leading arms maker, whose firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis. Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners with representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces. One of Mandl's favorite topics at these gatherings - which included meals with Hitler and Mussolini - was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes. As a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis and abhorred her husband's business ambitions. Mandl responded to his wilful wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape. She drugged her maid, snuck out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes and sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London. (She got out just in time. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl's factory. (He was half Jewish). Mandl fled to Brazil, where he later became an adviser to Argentina's iconic populist president, Juan Peron. In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM's biggest stars and appeared in more than 20 films. She was a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster. But Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies. At the height of her fame in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications system, optimized for sending coded messages that couldn't be jammed. She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their targets, a system to kill Nazis. By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the kind of single frequency radio-controlled technology Kiesler's ex-husband had been peddling. Most people won't recognize the name Kiesler - and no one would remember the name Hedy Markey. But it's a fair bet than anyone reading this post of a certain age will remember one of the great beauties of Hollywood's golden age - Hedy Lamarr. That's the name Louis B. Mayer gave to his prize actress. |
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