Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr is often proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” The 26-year-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 developing 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 being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.