Why We Work Late

For those of you don’t know who she is, her name is Hedy Lamarr. Until recently, most people just think of her as some glamorous starlet in Hollywood’s golden age; but she’s more than that. During WWII, she wanted to do all she can to help the war effort.

Working with George Antheil, she developed one of the earliest methods for frequency hopping, a secure method for transmitting data. Unfortunately, no one took her seriously; they ignored it. Instead, they asked the woman “who was too beautiful to speak” to help sell war bonds. She obliged by ‘selling kisses.’ Her war bond marketing campaign netted the modern equivalent of 220 million USD, accounting for inflation.

Decades pass and eventually, she just gave up. She stopped trying to convince people that she was more than a pretty face. With proof that society didn’t value her sharp intellect, she later became obsessed with maintaining her aging physical beauty with one botched cosmetic surgery after another. In her twilight years, she was so deformed that she rarely left her home and she has a quiet death.

Hedy’s work serves as one of the foundations of the information age, for technologies such as GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, CDMA based cellular networks, and so on. Yet she didn’t get the recognition she deserved until after her death. It’s a travesty that we aim to fix.