Well, the sultry film star epitomized glamour but certainly not stupidity. On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will present her with an award at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in San Francisco for--believe it or not--pioneering the cellular phone.
Lamarr and her husband, composer George Antheil (who died in 1959), filed some of the basic patents on "frequency hopping" that makes mobile, wireless communications possible.
According to Bruce Koball, technical adviser to the conference, it all started one day in 1941, when the couple were discussing how the Germans used jamming to protect themselves against attack by radio-controlled missiles. (Lamarr had recently divorced an arms dealer who sold to the Nazis, so this was not such an odd topic for the star of Samson and Delilah as it might sound.)
Koball composed experimental works for multiple player pianos and it struck the two that, just as pianos placed in different points in an auditorium create a cacophony, so a radio transmission that constantly jumped to different frequencies would be impossible to track. Although neither were engineers, they sketched out a patentable design for a radio transmitter controlled by by piano-roll strips.
At 82, Lamarr doesn't travel much, so her son Anthony Loder will accept the award, which is also being given posthumously to Antheil.
Reached by the Associated Press, Lamarr said "It's about time" someone recognized her achievement.