We
love highlighting
the many good stories about
women’s achievements in science and technology. When the story involves a 1940s
Hollywood star-turned-inventor who developed technologies we all use with our
smartphones today … well, we just have to share it with the world.
Today
on Google’s homepage we’re celebrating Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress Hollywood
once dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Lamarr’s own story
reads like a movie script: bored by the film industry and feeling typecast,
Lamarr was more interested in helping the Allied war effort as World War
II broke out than in the roles she was being offered. She had some
background in military munitions (yes, really), and together with a composer
friend, George Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked (yep, pianos)
to identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio signals.
The patent for “frequency hopping” Lamarr co-authored laid the groundwork for
widely-used technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and wifi that we rely upon daily.
It’s
no wonder, then, that Lamarr has kind of a mythical status at Google, and I was
pretty excited at the chance to tell her story in Doodle form. This took some
tinkering of my own—after deciding on the movie format as a nod to her
Hollywood career, I dug through old fashion illustrations and movie posters to
try to capture the look and feel of the 1940’s. Sketching storyboards on a
yellow notepad helped me figure out how to show Lamarr in very different
scenarios—movie star by day, inventor by night—which we then animated and set
to the awesome soundtrack created by composer Adam Ever-Hadani.
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