The Story Behind the Story

• 2022-2026
• 6 seasons
• Talk & Interview

Our story starts off in the luxurious German home of Fritz and Hedwig who are entertaining guests for dinner. These guests just happen to be Nazi officers. Hedwig would listen to these men, but hated that her husband was selling them weapons. At the next dinner party Hedwig pulled out all the stops, wearing her best evening gown and all of her finest jewelry. During the meal Hedwig excused herself only to never return. The next morning a stunning woman arrived by train in Paris and was shortly thereafter discovered by Louis B. Mayer of MGM fame. A year later she was starring opposite the leading men in Hollywood as Hedy Lamarr. By 1941 she was regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world. Hedy was not only beautiful, but extremely intelligent and an amateur inventor. Her first big idea came when she read about the Germans sinking unarmed merchant marine ships and how the Germans were jamming the frequencies of the allied torpedoes. She recalled the untapped potential of radio waves and she designed a device that would allow radio signals to hop from one frequency to another, which would thus overcome the jamming signal. She patented her invention and gave it to the Navy. Unfortunately the Navy's representative felt she was too beautiful to invent something like this and her invention was shelved, and many more merchant marine ships were sunk. Years later, in fact during the Cuban missile crises Hedy's invention was tested and it worked. She was never accredited with the invention, but it turned out that her patent led to the development of our modern day communications satellite systems. And her idea of radio hopping led to the development of WI-FI.