On Topic: A beautiful mind

We first catch sight of Hedy Lamarr through a screen. Then she suddenly thrusts herself into the cabin, and the camera closes in on her face, a light falling like a brush across her eyes.

She waits. And waits. And waits.

Then she speaks: “I am Tondelayo.”

And then she smiles ….

In the 1942 movie “White Cargo,” set in a steamy rubber plantation, Austrian-born Lamarr plays an untamed jungle beauty with an accent found nowhere on the African continent. In discussing Lamarr's acting skills, writer David Thomson noted diplomatically in “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” that the star had “extensive limits.”

The name Hollywood gave to Hedwig Kiesler, Thomson wrote, “on Bob Hope's lips, say, was enough to get a laugh.”

Oh, she'd also larked stark naked in “Ecstasy,” an Austrian motion picture most people in America hadn't seen, but they'd certainly heard about it.

But her acting ability and the absurdity of her smoldering, notorious screen characters were irrelevant. Lamarr was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and that's what audiences went to see. (Check out any of her clips on YouTube or her pictures that turn up on Turner Classic Movies - her publicists weren't misguided.)

It's this very persona that makes the off-screen side of Lamarr's life so astonishing.

And why the fatheads at the Pentagon, in the midst of World War II, couldn't see beyond her perfectly symmetric face to appreciate that “the most beautiful woman in the world” had co-invented a radio-controlled guidance system for torpedoes that could have helped the Allied cause.

Pulitzer-Prize-winner Richard Rhodes's book, “Hedy's Folly” (Doubleday, 2011), explains the invention:

… If a radio transmitter and receiver are synchronized to change their tuning simultaneously, hopping together randomly from frequency to frequency, then the radio signal passing between them cannot be jammed.

Lamarr's partner in inventing the “frequency-hopping” concept, and co-holder of its 1942 patent, was a music composer, George Antheil. Lamarr's son told Rhodes the pair came up with the notion while playing dueling pianos - a sort of guess-that-tune parlor game.

“Hedy's Folly” traces the frequency-hopping concept's path to the development of the sonobuoy, an enemy submarine sonar-detection system, through to today's Wi-Fi.

This wasn't Lamarr's only brainy inspiration. She also had devised a cube that, with water, would dissolve into a soft drink.

Among Lamarr's other ideas, Rhodes lists “a new kind of traffic stoplight,” a fluorescent dog collar, a device to help movement-impaired bathers out of the tub, a “skin-tautening technique based on the principle of the accordion” and some modifications for the Concorde.

She also could perform card tricks.

How could this glamor queen have come up such complicated notions? She had been married, back in Vienna, to a munitions manufacturer - a marriage she fled, lured by Hollywood and to escape her husband's fascist politics.

She surely picked up some tricks of the trade around the dinner table. But maybe Lamarr was also one smart cookie.

The take-away for today's managers in Lamarr's story? Simply this: You never know from where that next good idea might spring.

It's a lesson

Peter Drucker would've embraced.