Science is adorable

[CrispyQ]

6. Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr: Scientist & Inventor of Spread-Spectrum Technology

http://theamericanshow.com/?p=1602


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What do Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Mary Anning, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Jocelyn Bell, Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin, and Hedy Lamarr (among others) have in common? They each made extraordinary scientific discoveries that went unrecognized because they were women, many of them having to endure male colleagues taking credit for their work, then winning Nobel prizes for it. Even Marie Curie — sadly the only woman scientist anyone can ever think of — was dismissed as little more than her husband’s assistant, her Nobel prizes contested by fellow scientists. On December 10, 1911, Marie Curie won her second Nobel, the only person ever to win two Nobels in two different sciences, yet a hundred years later, in 2011, no women were among the nine Nobel winners in the sciences, and women remain severely underrepresented in the STEM professions — science, technology, engineering, and math.


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Hedy Lamarr has found a notable male ally in Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Richard Rhodes. His delightful, explosive book entitled Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World has brought significant, well-deserved recognition to this woman’s remarkable scientific achievements.

As some people do puzzles or watch birds, Hedy invented. As a child from a secular Jewish family in Austria in the 1920s, she absorbed her banker father’s love of knowing how things worked. At sixteen she dropped out of school to pursue a career in acting. Her success was immediate with a groundbreaking film called Ekstase. Rhodes maintains it was a strikingly modern exploration of female sexuality and a reversal of Victorian paternalism. “Had the film been released in the 1960s instead of the 1930s,” Rhodes speculates, “it might have been hailed as feminist.”

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I worked at an company that manufactured wireless equipment & the engineering conference room was named Hedy Lamarr.

When I was in 5th grade, our civics teacher mentioned that we'll never know how many inventions were actually made by women, because women couldn't file patents for a long time. She mentioned the irony of inventions that make household chores easier & how likely was it that all of them were created by men, who generally in that time period, didn't do those household chores. That was an eye-opening statement for my young mind.

Great sub-thread.

on edit: add photo!