When you think of celebrities today, what do you think? Pretty but quite dim and shallow people who have to play stupid celebrity tricks to get attention before finally joining alien space cult religions or selling the rights to their death to a glossy magazine. It's all 'Brangelina', 'TomKat', 'Posh and Becks' and the like. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. 
Well, jump back the 1930s and meet Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born actress who became a U.S. citizen and had a career as a Hollywood actress working for MGM Studios - and a beautiful and glamorous one at that. In 1942, she worked with her neighbour, the composer George Antheil, on designing and prototyping a system for radio frequency-hopping, which they patented. This technology is used for a wide variety of radio transmission. As a child, it always intrigued me how you could scan the AM band and find tiny snippets of police transmissions, but they would then shift away quickly. Frequency-hopping is used for everything from police and military radio down to the Bluetooth radios present in computers, phones and other hands-free sets. Lamarr's work was tremendously early, and it took until 1962 for it to be implemented by the U.S. military during the naval blockade of Cuba. Today, this is foundational for wide swathes of radio and wireless technology. Just the other week, a friend of mine showed me a tiny little battery-powered Bluetooth printer that could produce reasonable quality small photographic prints transmitted to it from a phone.
Now, do any of the people you see in Heat magazine these days do anything as useful and interesting in their spare time?
This post is part of Ada Lovelace Day (other posts), where people across the globe blog to draw attention to the influence that women play in technology, and as a way to help my geeky sisters to fight back against the tide of misogynist crap that's churned out by my gender in the tech space: at LeWeb and TechCrunch, with the whole "girls automatically love pink phones!" shit, the idiotic "hardcore coder" meme (what, you don't use the latest Ruby doodad? You're just softcore, or frigid!) and even hosting geek events at Hooters.
