Actress, ballerina... engineer?

During WWII, Hollywood icon and polymath Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping device that was designed to be used by the US Navy to avoid radio jamming. While she and collaborator George Antheil received a patent for this system, the military declared it useless at the time.

Time proved them wrong: the ground-breaking technology would underpin now ubiquitous wireless technologies including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS.