With her dark, radiant, striking good looks, Hedy Lamarr was often described as the most beautiful woman in the world, or as the most beautiful woman to ever appear in movies. During the 1940’s and 1950’s there was an explosion of women requesting her profile from their plastic surgeons. Her name would become a household word for glamour. Yet she said several times, and that this was the secret of her beauty, “Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Stupid, she was not. Without her invention as recorded in U.S. Patent No. 2.292,387 for a “Secret Communications System” involving spread spectrum technology, wireless signals, encoding and frequency switching, today, your cell phone would not work.