Nov 9, 2015
Hedy Lamarr's 101st birthday
We love highlighting the many good stories about
women’s achievements in science and technology. When the story involves
a 1940s Hollywood star-turned-inventor who helped develop technologies
we all use with our smartphones today… well, we just have to share it
with the world.
Today on Google’s homepage we’re celebrating Hedy Lamarr, the
Austrian-born actress Hollywood once dubbed “the most beautiful woman
in the world.” Lamarr’s own story reads like a movie script: bored by
the film industry and feeling typecast, Lamarr was more interested in
helping the Allied war effort as World War II broke out than in the
roles she was being offered.
She had some background in military
munitions (yes, really), and together with a composer friend, George
Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked (yep, pianos) to
identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio
signals.
The patent for “frequency hopping” Lamarr co-authored laid the
groundwork for widely-used technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and wifi
that we rely upon daily.
It’s no wonder, then, that Lamarr has kind of a mythical status at
Google, and I was pretty excited at the chance to tell her story in
Doodle form. This took some tinkering of my own—after deciding on the
movie format as a nod to her Hollywood career, I dug through old fashion
illustrations and movie posters to try to capture the look and feel of
the 1940’s.
Sketching storyboards on a yellow notepad helped me figure
out how to show Lamarr in very different scenarios—movie star by day,
inventor by night—which we then animated and set to the awesome
soundtrack created by composer Adam Ever-Hadani.
Jennifer Hom, Doodler
day one of sketches and exploration
storyboard organizing
alternative ending from an early draft
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