Table of Contents

Birth ----- 4

Learning about machines ----- 5

The Arts ----- 6

Acting for the First Time ----- 7

Marriage ----- 8

A Hollywood Star ----- 10

Hedy's Scientific Mind ----- 11

Inventing for the Military ----- 14

Hedy's Most Famous Invention ----- 16

A Brilliant Mind is Recognised ----- 18

Death ----- 20

Credits ----- 21

Birth

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born on November 9th, 1914 in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family. Her parents were Gertrud Kiesler and Emil Kiesler and she had no siblings.

Learning About Machines

When Hedy was only 5 years old her dad would take her for long walks and they would talk about how different machines like cars work. Hedy was very interested in this and she liked to take apart and reassemble her music box to see how it worked.

The Arts

Hedy's mother Gertrud (She went by Trude) was a concert pianist so she wanted her daughter to be introduced to the arts. So when Hedy was still very young her mother placed her in ballet and piano lessons.

Acting for the First Time

When Hedy was 16, a director named Max Reinhardt found her. She went to Berlin, Germany and studied acting with him. By 1930, she got her first small role in a German film called Geld auf der Straβe (Money on the Street). But 1932 was when she became famous for her role in the movie Ecstasy.  

Marriage

A man named Fritz Mandl became one of Hedy's big fans when he saw her in the play Sissy. Hedy married him in 1933 (She was only 19 years old!) but she wasn't very happy being his wife. She felt that she couldn't be an actress if she was married to him and she was forced to smile when Fritz talked about his friends who were with the Nazi party. So in 1937 she left him

and went to London but also took with her the knowledge of wartime weaponry from her conversations with Fritz. 

A Hollywood Star

When Hedy was in London she met Louis B. Mayer of the MGM Studios. With meeting him she got a ticket to Hollywood where Americans were amazed by her acting skills. She was also introduced to a bunch of new people including business man and pilot Howard Hughes. Hedy dated Howard and was very interested in his desire for innovation. 

Hedy's Scientific Mind

Hedy's scientific mind had been bottled up by being in Hollywood but Howard helped fuel the innovator inside her by giving her a set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. She already had an inventing table set up in her trailer but the new equipment would let her work on inventions between takes. Howard showed her his airplane factories, how his 

planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind the process. He told her that he wanted to create faster planes that he could sell to the U.S. Military, and Hedy knew what to do. She looked up the fastest fish and the fastest bird, combined the fins and wings of those two animals and used them to sketch a new wing design for Howard's plane. When Hedy showed this to him, he said, "You're a  

genius." Hedy definitely was a genius. She once said: "Improving things comes naturally to me." She made other inventions like an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a type of pop that was similar to Coca-Cola. But her most significant invention was engineered when the United States was getting geared up for World War ll.