Hedy Lamarr: The Hollywood Star Who Helped Create WiFi
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, she was called the most beautiful woman in the world, yet Hedy Lamarr’s greatest gift had little to do with her looks. During World War II, she and George Antheil sketched out a way to keep military communications secure by sending signals across multiple frequencies. Their work was shelved and forgotten at the time, but the principles behind it power nearly every wireless connection today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.7 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to |
| 0:21.8 | sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your stories, send them |
| 0:26.8 | to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. And today we have Faith bringing us |
| 0:32.8 | the story of Eddie Lamar. Take it away, Faith. |
| 0:40.9 | Famous hom actress Hetty Lamar was born in Austria in 1914. |
| 0:46.3 | By the mid-1940s, she became the world's first superstar in Hollywood. |
| 0:52.7 | She was known for her striking beauty and her at times scandalous movie |
| 0:56.5 | appearances. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes wrote a book titled, Hetty's Folly, the |
| 1:03.0 | life and breakthrough inventions of Hetty Lamar, the most beautiful woman in the world. |
| 1:09.0 | This book helps unpack the life of a woman that perhaps we thought we knew. |
| 1:13.9 | Here is Richard Rhodes. |
| 1:17.0 | When she walked into a room, she actually stopped conversations. |
| 1:22.9 | People would be startled by her appearance. |
| 1:26.8 | The sad tragedy of her life in a way, though, |
| 1:32.1 | was that she was also highly intelligent. |
| 1:37.1 | And since she was so strikingly beautiful, |
| 1:41.1 | hardly anyone ever noticed her intelligence. |
| 1:52.0 | It wasn't factored into the kind of role she was given in movies, where she usually played some conventionally beautiful woman, |
| 1:57.0 | falling in and out of love with a handsome leading man. I mean, the tragedy of this woman was that she was, as she pointed out more than a pretty face. |
| 2:09.6 | She liked to say sarcastically, I can tell you how to be glamorous. |
| 2:16.6 | All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. |
... |
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