Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood Goddess and Lady Bluetooth

Born in 1914 in Döbling, Vienna, the young Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler already loved to experiment as a little girl. She also discovered her love for film at an early age. And so she made history with her very first foray into the film business: A screen-filling nude scene in the Czech arthouse film “Ekstase” was a full-blown scandal. Later, she played Empress Elizabeth at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. In 1933, the actress married the much older, and quite jealous, weapons manufacturer Fritz Mandl, whom she ran away from to New York in 1937. She changed her name to Hedy Lamarr upon the recommendation of legendary MGM-Studio head Louis B. Mayer. Billed as „the world’s most beautiful woman,” Lamarr was known more for her androgynous, European style than her acting skills. In the late 1930s, fellow actresses copied her style, coloured their hair brunette and wore it parted in the middle. Like Lamarr, they wore hats, turbans and scarves. Neither the movie “Algiers” nor the history drama „Samson and Delilah“ directed by Cecile B. DeMille were smash hits.

Apart from acting, Lamarr was interested in technological innovations. Together with experimental musician George Antheil, who also had immigrated to the US, she developed a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication which is used today - in a slightly different form - in wireless communications such as Bluetooth. For this invention, she was awarded the technological equivalent of an Oscar, the EEF-Pioneer Award. Hedy Lamarr died in 2000, in Florida, in relative obscurity. Today, her reputation as “Lady Bluetooth'' is her most important legacy.

Hedy Lamarr was once celebrated as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” but today she is mostly known as a pioneer of Bluetooth technology. The screen goddess was born in 1914 in Vienna. Since 2018, the city of Vienna has been awarding the Hedy Lamarr Prize. It is not an award for acting, but rather a way of honouring women who shape(d) the digital world. In 2020, the recipient was Italian scientist Laura Nenzi. The computer scientist hails from Venice and works at the Technical University of Vienna at the Institute for Computer Engineering, where she is concerned with the logic of artificial intelligence and aims to explain models of machine learning and to predict the behavior of cyber-physical systems. We asked Laura Nenzi about her life as a scientist in Vienna.