IN: Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914 -  January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are arguably incorporated into Bluetooth technology, and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (nee Lichtwitz; 1894-1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880-1935). Her father was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director.  Her mother Gertrud was a pianist and Budapest native who came from an upper-class Jewish family; she had converted from Judaism to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian", who raised her daughter as a Christian. Lamarr helped get her mother out of Austria (then under Nazi domination) and to the United States, and she later became an American citizen. Gertrud Kiesler put "Hebrew" as her race on her petition for naturalization as an American citizen.  In the late 1920s, Lamarr was discovered as an actress and brought to Berlin by producer Max Reinhardt. Following her training in the theater, she returned to Vienna to work in the film industry, first as a script girl, and soon as an actress. In early 1933, at age 18, she starred in Gustav Machaty's film, Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). Her role was that of a neglected young wife married to an indifferent older man. The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.  Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, the film was considered an artistic work, while in America, it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.  She went on to play a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Austrian royalty produced in Vienna, which won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial status. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Mussolini, and later, Hitler, but could not stop the headstrong Hedy.

How did she start her career?

OUT: Lamarr was discovered as an actress and brought to Berlin by producer Max Reinhardt.


IN: Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 (or 25) February 1861 - 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect and esotericist. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality.

Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829 - 1910), left a position as a gamekeeper in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn - 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Kraljevec in the Murakoz region of the Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Medimurje region of northernmost Croatia). In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Modling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.  Steiner entered the village school; following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudorfl and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt.  In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology, where he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, biology, literature, and philosophy on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883, at the end of which time he withdrew from the institute without graduating. In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers, Karl Julius Schroer, suggested Steiner's name to Joseph Kurschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe's works, who asked Steiner to become the edition's natural science editor, a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications.  Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

Any siblings?

OUT: