In 1933 a beautiful teenage actress by the name of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler appeared in a Czech film known in English as Ecstasy. In the film, her character goes for a nude swim in a lake and then discovers her horse has run off, in a premise that sounds like that of a porno, she gets out of the water and runs naked around the woods looking for her horse until she comes across a man. From there, well, if you must know the film was banned in the USA, condemned by the Pope, and her evil husband reportedly bought as many copies of the film as he could because of his disgust with her facial expressions. So it's presumably awesome.



Hedwig's husband was Friedrich Mandl an Austrian arms manufacturer of Jewish descent, and Nazi collaborator. While with Friederich, Hedwig associated with many high-ranking Nazis including Hitler.

Be assured, she hated all of them. She drugged her nudie-film stealing husband and the maid hired to spy on her and made her escape out of a second story window. She fled to London where she hooked up with film producer Louis Mayer.

Mayer had her name changed to Hedy Lamarr, which became a running gag in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles when the wicked Hedley Lamarr would become flustered and correct everyone whenever he heard the name Hedy Lamarr.

Her grudge with the Nazis undiminished, she used the knowledge she gained from her marriage to a weapons manufacturer to sketch a wild idea on the back of a cocktail napkin. She took it to a composer by the name of George Antheil and the two created a frequency hopping communication device to make it harder for the enemy to jam or detect radio-guided torpedoes.

The device was ahead of its time and didn't see wide use until the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since then, however, it has been the basis of numerous technologies, cell phones use it, satellites use it, it's even helping you stay connected if you're using Wifi.

Hedy Lamarr's remarkable life soon turned into what could be described as an E! True Hollywood Story. She was married a total of five times, apparently leaving the last one after being threatened with a baseball bat.

She was arrested in 1965 and 1991 for shoplifting but was never charged. She also filed a few lawsuits, notably against Mel Brooks for using her name and Hedley Lamarr as a joke in Blazing Saddles. She passed away in 2000 at the age of 86 in Florida. She had become a naturalized US citizen in 1953.

To recap- Hedy Lamarr was one of the first actresses to appear nude in a major film, she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world during her prime, and also patented a revolutionary technology. Today, we're stuck with Charlize Theron and Halle Berry, both of whom, I can assure you, are not designing military hardware between films.