If the headline piqued your interest, it isn’t surprising given that all automobiles made in the past 50 years (with perhaps the exception of the Trabant and the Yugo) have a working heater, not to mention turn signals, windshield wipers, and a rear-view mirror, and many made since the mid-1990s have built-in navigation systems.
There’s one commonality to all of these features aside from being standard equipment: They were all invented by women.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Ford Motor Co. released the Ford Explorer “Men’s Only Edition,” a model that seems more appropriate for 23 days hence, when we celebrate April Fools’ Day.
A “commercial” for the Men’s Only Edition, narrated by actor Bryan Cranston, highlights the standard equipment this particular model lacks, namely a working heater, turn signals, windshield wipers, a rear-view mirror, and navigation.
While you may not know the names of the inventors of most of these features, you should know Hedy Lamarr’s. Lamarr was responsible, along with composer George Antheil, for developing the technology that continues, to this day, to serve as the foundation for today’s wireless networks including the GPS, or global positioning system, which powers modern satellite-based navigation systems.
Hedy Lamarr, born in Vienna on November 9, 1914 as Hedwig Maria Eva Kiesler, was much more than a pretty face, much more than a glamorous movie star whose career partnered her with Spencer Tracy, Charles Boyer, Robert Young, James Stewart, and Victor Mature in the 1940s and 50s.
Their project, for which a patent under the title “Secret Communication System” was filed in 1941 and developed as a method for secure military communications in the second World War, was the basis behind spread-spectrum communications technology including Wi-Fi networks, GSM, Bluetooth, and GPS.
The other inventors – equally worthy of note despite being lesser known – are Florence Lawrence, an American-Canadian actress from the silent film age who pioneered brake lights and turn signals; Dorothy Levitt, a typist-for-a-car-company-turned-racer who came up with the idea of the rearview mirror; Dorothée Pullinger, a draughtswoman who became the manager of Galloway Motors, which produced an automobile designed for smaller-framed female drivers and a vehicle described in the publication Light Car and Cycle in 1921 as “ a car built by ladies, for those of their own sex”; and Gladys West, an American mathematician known for her work on the development of the satellite geodesy models eventually incorporated into GPS.
Lawrence’s mother, Lotte Lawrence, came up with an idea for a windshield-wiping system but neither she nor her daughter ever patented either of their inventions.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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