It is already widely agreed that the first programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace, a daughter of Lord Byron. She wrote algorithms for the theoretical Babbage's Analytical Engine.
But did you know that among telecommunication specialists, there is also an opinion that a woman stands behind Bluetooth? Hedy Lamarr, the mother of Bluetooth.
Hedy was an actress, famous in her time. When she was 18, she played the main role in the movie Ecstasy. It was a very controversial and sexual movie.
Soon after that, she married Fritz Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. As she later wrote in her autobiography, that was a poor choice, as Fritz was an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her appearance in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. One day, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all her jewelry to a dinner party, then disappeared afterward.
She fled to the United States. She had nice timing; it was 1937, so only two years before World War 2, and she was Jewish. Over there, she became a famous actress, playing roles in many loud productions of 30s, 40s, and 50s. However, Hedy had a passion; she was an inventor. She was designing and drafting inventions, such as an improved traffic light and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a flavored carbonated drink. She often did that between takes on set.
Her greatest invention was made during World War 2. She learned that navies needed "a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water." Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course.
She had an original idea for preventing that: the signal could frequently change frequencies. The changes are controlled by a code known to both transmitter and receiver. This way, even if enemies were jamming on specific frequencies, enough signal would reach the missiles to control them. This is known as Time Hopping.
The US Navy never used this technology; it was too big and too heavy. They lacked something that was invented later: the transistor.
Much later, in 1994, the Swedish company Ericsson worked on a protocol for exchanging data between devices. They decide to use Time Hopping to limit the effects of natural noise. Were they inspired by Hedy's invention? I don’t know, but it was she who first formalized the idea for this …
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children. Her husbands were a producer, a baseball player, a nightclub owner, a Texas oilman, and, finally, her divorce lawyer.
Hady’s face was used on CorelDRAW's famous cover, which we all remember from the early 2000s. It became iconic, but Hady sued Corel for using it without her permission.
You might like her or not, but Hedy had a very interesting life. It is so strange that she is now mostly remembered by professors in the telecommunication department who present here on a slide about the history of Bluetooth.
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