Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was an actress and inventor, known as the mother of Wi-Fi. As an actress, her innovative mind was ignored and only her beauty was admired. At the age of 5, Lamarr would take apart and reassemble her music box to understand the machine. Her brilliant mind was ignored, as typical of society's views on women, and was discovered for acting at the age of 16. She later met businessman and pilot Howard Hughes who took Hedy to his plane factories. This was where Hedy Lamarr gained her innovator persona back and sketched a new wing design that was the most efficient type seen yet. Surprisingly, these designs were based off of fish and bird anatomy. Hedy's innovations did not stop here. She improved the stoplight and crafted a tablet that could dissolve in water to make soda, but the peak creation of her lifetime was yet to come. Hedy Lamarr created a system that involved a frequency hopping system among radio waves. This prevented the interception of radio waves and allowed intended targets to be attained. Hedy's genius was not recognized by the public still, until her later years where she was awarded The Pioneer Award (1997) and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award among others. Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of frequency hopping technology that paved the way for wireless communications that we use today such as Bluetooth and GPS.
