Spoiler : So witty. That's the first time I've heard that one in an hour. Let's put that in the closet of tired cliches along with "Elvis had left the building", "Not ready for prime time", "Wild and crazy guy" and "material girl." I beg of you. The Hedy Lamarr story is fascinating and not just the setup for a punchline.

Spoiler : But surely one of the most fascinating chapters in Lamarr’s life and career had nothing to do with her film career and everything to do with her brain power. How many movie stars can you name, who hold the patent on a significant technological breakthrough? It’s a story even Hollywood couldn’t have invented. Hedy Lamarr shares the title to a 1942 patent, under her then legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey, for a “secret communication system” intended for use as a radio guidance device for U.S. Navy torpedoes. Along with her co-inventor and avant-garde musician George Antheil (1900-1959), Lamarr came up with the idea of “frequency hopping” to quickly shift the radio signals of control devices, making them invulnerable to radio interference or jamming, a feat of technological prowess that was only formally acknowledged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in March 1997 — even more belatedly for Mr. Antheil, who died in 1959. But for the 83-year-old Lamarr, then a Florida retiree, “It was about time.” (See the video below for more about Hedy and her invention.) The US military simply let the patent languish in their archives, in part because the technology of the time was not up to implementing such a system, and it is only now – in the age of the digital mobile phone – that Antheil’s and Lamarr’s system has come into its own. Instead of “frequency hopping,” today’s technical term is “spread spectrum,” but the basic idea is the same. The FCC allotted a special section of the radio spectrum for an experiment using the spread spectrum to make wireless phone calls more secure from eavesdroppers. First used secretly by the US military in the 1960s, commercial interests could hardly wait to use this “new” technology in the 1990s. A lot of money has been lavished on the process, which has the added benefit of allowing more cell-phone users to use the existing frequency spectrum.