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 sonar sub-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.