So yesterday I had a little free time and pulled out the old Apple Pencil and looked around for a new subject to draw.

I found one and here it is:

Actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) is my latest subject.

She was an incredible beauty, easily among the most beautiful women to grace the screen.  Some may find her name familiar, perhaps due to Harvey Korman’s hilarious character “Hedley Lamarr” in the film Blazing Saddles (she sued for the use of her name and the case was settled out of court).  But what made Ms. Lamarr all the more fascinating beyond her many roles and her breathtaking beauty was this fact, which I’ve cut and pasted from IMDB:

(Hedy Lamarr) was co-inventor (with composer George Antheil) of the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as “frequency hopping”, which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. The method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942, under the name “Secret Communications System”. Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology. However, neither she nor Antheil profited from this fact, because their patents were allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Hedy Lamarr was one of the two people to create what would become our manner of using cellular phones!

Sadly, she joins the list of far too many people who created/invented great things in their lifetimes but didn’t live to see their ideas/creations become well known.

Here’s to you, Ms. Lamarr.  Beauty and brains.

Incredible.