Too Beautiful To Be Brainy

Our IDEAS Meeting Room

In our co-working offices at OUR HQ we like to celebrate success,

That’s why, dotted about our brand new office in Glasgow you’ll see references to business men and women whose efforts have made a lasting impression on our lives.

We like to think that their incredible achievements can help inspire the rest of us to reach for the stars.

The Ideas Room in our ergonomically designed premises is a stunning example of how we admire and appreciate outstanding entrepreneurs in Glasgow.

This is one of three purposely-designed meeting rooms which your firm can use for private get-togethers with commercial contacts and or business colleagues.

On OUR HQ’s Wall of Fame, you’ll find portraits of six high achievers. Three of them are of famous men – Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

One is of a well-known woman, the architect Zaha Hadid who, among many other incredible structures, designed the Riverside Museum in Glasgow.

Hedy Lamarr

The other two portraits are of relatively obscure figures who defied challenging periods in their lives to make their mark for posterity. And it is these two we’re going to focus on.

Hedy Lamarr was a screen goddess during the Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the late 1920s to the early 1960s.

At her peak she was described as the most beautiful woman in the world.

Despite her glittering movie career, Hedy is revered in the world of science and technology for designing and patenting Frequency Hopping.

This is the technology that ultimately became the basis for GPS, Bluetooth and the excellent Wi-Fi connectivity in OUR HQ’s Glasgow office.

Incredibly, her initially unrecognised inventiveness and design brilliance originally came to life during World War Two, more than 80 years ago!

It was ignored, partly because in 1941 the critics believed she was too beautiful to be brainy.

It was decades later before her genius was finally appreciated.

Hedy Lamarr was born in November 1914 in Vienna, Austria, to a well-off family. Her Jewish father was a successful banker and her mother, who was originally Jewish but had converted to Roman Catholicism, was a concert pianist. 

At the age of 12 she won a beauty contest and was showing an interest in acting. She was also fascinated by technology and was encouraged by her father who would explain how inventions worked.

She took acting classes and, while still a teenager, she made her screen breakthrough and had secured several starring roles in European productions.

While still only 18, she was given the lead in a film that would become notorious around the world.

In Ecstasy she played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man. It was a scenario which she would later endure.

The 1933 film created shock waves for showing scenes of nudity, which were uncommon at the time.

In most of Europe the film was regarded as a work of great artistic merit.

But in America, women’s groups were furious at its content and it led to bans there and in Germany.

Among many of her stage roles, she starred in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna.

The critics loved it. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her.

She ignored them all, but one man, Friedrich Mandl, was determined to see her.

Mandl was an Austrian arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in the country.

She eventually fell for him, even though her parents objected to him on the grounds of his business and personal dealings with the anti-Jewish Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.

In 1933, she married Mandl. He was 33, nearly 15 years older.

Although they lived in a castle, hers was far from a fairytale marriage.

In her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her performance in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career.

She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their palatial home.

It wasn’t all bad though. Hedy accompanied her husband to business meetings, where they met up with and associated with specialists who were working on military tech.

This is where her great interest in the science began to grow.

She eventually got fed up with her husband and in 1937, fled their home by bicycle in the middle of the night and ended up in Paris.

A few months later she arrived in London, where, thanks to the notoriety she had attracted from Ecstasy, she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful head of the MGM studios.

He offered her $125 a week to sign with him and although it was a colossal sum of money she refused.

But she was determined to make it in Hollywood and bought a ticket on the ocean liner in which he was travelling back to New York.

During the voyage she negotiated a contract with him worth $500 a week. Today this is the equivalent of over $11,000!

At that point she was still known by her birth name, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler.

Mayer changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, and a star was born.

Her first notable performance came in the romantic drama Algiers.

More success followed with the Western Boom Town and the drama White Cargo.

Her most successful film was the epic Samson and Delilah.

Both Algiers and Sampson and Delilah were nominated for Oscars.

She also acted on television before the release of her final film in 1958. Two years later she was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Throughout her career she continued her scientific research.

In Beverly Hills she hung around with the likes of John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes.

The latter, a big-time studio tycoon turned aviation engineer who became one of the world’s richest men, provided her with equipment to run experiments in her trailer during breaks from acting.

Then at the beginning of World War II, along with celebrated composer George Antheil, Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code to synchronize frequency changes between the transmitter and receiver.

They called it Frequency Hopping and it eventually became the basis for Wi-Fi.

Her quest began when she learned about the US Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes.

She came up with a plan to help the US war effort and recruited George. Together they worked on a project they described as a Secret Communication System.

The idea was to constantly change frequencies on the radio messages received by the torpedoes, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the messages.

The hope was that the US torpedo systems would become immune to radio jamming by the enemy.

The technique was ignored at the time but it worked spectacularly well and became widely used in modern communications.

Their work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, more than 70 years after their design was created.

Hedy Lamarr never had any formal training yet was able to incorporate her life experiences and artistic imagination into one of the most important inventions of the technological age.

During a dark, chaotic time, she tried to help change the world. 

Hedy passed away in 2000 with ever receiving a penny for her great scientific work. 

Today, as we sit at our offices in Glasgow, perhaps we can appreciate her portrait and draw inspiration from her achievements.

OUR HQ’s second distinguished role model is Gladys West, whose rise to fame could not be more different to Hedy Lamarr’s.

She was born on October 27, 1930 to a poor family in rural Virginia.

From those humble beginnings she grew up to become one of America’s foremost mathematicians.

She is known for her contributions to the mathematical modelling of the shape of the Earth.

Her work was crucial to the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) we all take for granted these days.

She was born Gladys Mae Brown to an African-American farming family.

As a child she helped on the farm.

Her parents needed to work outside the farm to make ends meet. Her mother toiled in a tobacco factory and her father worked on the railroad. Life was tough.

The top two students from each graduating class at her high school received full scholarships to Virginia State College (now Virginia State University), a historically black public university.

Gladys graduated in 1948, and was awarded the scholarship.

At college she studied maths, and became one of only a very small number of women on the male-dominated course.

After graduating in 1952 she taught maths and science for a couple of years before returning to VSU for 12 months to study for her Master’s degree.

In 1956, she started work at the Naval Proving Ground in Virginia.

She was the second black woman hired and one of only four black employees at the centre.

There, Gladys was admired for her ability to solve complex mathematical equations by hand.

She eventually transitioned from solving those equations herself to programming computers to do it for her.

Gladys became a fully-fledged computer programmer and later a project manager for processing systems for satellite data analysis.

Throughout the 1960s she continued on her upward trajectory taking on greater responsibilities and producing outstanding scientific results.

From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, she programmed a computer to deliver increasingly precise calculations for the shape of the Earth.

To make her calculations she needed to use complex algorithms to account for variations in the gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth's shape.

Gladys met her husband Ira at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, where he also worked as a mathematician. They were two of only four black employees at the time.

They were married in 1957. Ira died on October 20, 2024. 

During her career, Gladys encountered many hardships because of racism against African Americans.

This included the lack of recognition she received at work, while her white coworkers received praise and added privileges.

Her biography makes clear her disappointment at not being granted projects that included travel and exposure.

Despite these setbacks she was eventually recognised.

She retired in 1998 after a long and distinguished career and was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame 10 years later.

It was one of the highest honours bestowed by Air Force Space Command, who described her as one of the 'Hidden Figures' in the team who did computing for the US military in the era before electronic systems.

The Hidden Figures were individuals, often Black women, whose insightful contributions to science went unrecognized in their time because of their race or gender.

Capt. Godfrey Weekes, commanding officer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, described her role in the development of GPS thus: “As Gladys West started her career in 1956, she likely had no idea that her work would impact the world for decades to come.”

In 2021, she was awarded the Prince Philip Medal by the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, their highest individual honour.

Gladys is still alive and the world continues to reap the benefits from her outstanding contributions to science and mathematics.

Of course there are four more giants of industry, commerce and design featured on the Wall of Fame in our meeting room.

Elon Musk

The most controversial of them all is Elon Musk, who is loved and hated in almost equal proportions.

He is currently the world’s wealthiest person, worth an estimated $320 billion.

At one point everything he touched turned to gold.

He was involved with Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, Twitter (which he rebranded as X) and America PAC.

For a long while he couldn’t take a wrong step.

But this year his fortunes began to change, and not for the better.

He’d always had political leanings and those activities divided people across the globe.

He was criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories.

His acquisition of Twitter (now X) led to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the service.

He engaged in political activities in several countries, including as a vocal and financial supporter of Donald Trump.

And it was that closeness to the new American President that led to a wave of anti-Musk protests.

President Trump appointed him as a senior advisor and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

His performance in that role has led to a ferocious backlash against him personally and Tesla, his most famous brand.

Under his leadership the firm reached a peak stock market valuation of $1 trillion.

That was In October 2021 when the share price was $371. Today it is more than $100 dollars lower.

This is the price he is paying for leading the most radical government transformation in decades.

As head of DOGE, a new initiative aimed at slashing bureaucracy, privatizing inefficiencies and reshaping the U.S. government — Musk is once again disrupting the establishment, and the backlash has been explosive.

Tesla dealerships have been attacked. Protests have erupted. Threats against Musk have escalated to the point where he has had to increase his personal security detail.

In March 2025 it was reported that Tesla's sales in key European markets continued to fall.

Drivers were said to be shunning Elon Musk's electric car brand as a result of competition from China alongside some protest against his political views.

In response to his right-wing activism, Tesla cars and dealerships became targets for vandalism.

Dozens of cars were burnt and showrooms spray painted in several European cities including Rome, Berlin and Stockholm.

In Berkeley, California over 1,000 demonstrators filled the street in front of a Tesla dealership to show their displeasure with Elon Musk’s efforts at DOGE to dramatically scale down the federal workforce. 

In the UK, Protesters gathered outside Tesla showrooms to make a stand against him.

A group assembled opposite the car giant's premises in Cribbs Causeway, Bristol, to oppose Mr Musk's recent prominence in US politics.

Holding signs urging people to boycott the company, the 'Tesla Takedown' protest is part of a global action mirroring demonstrations held in the US.

Critics of President Donald Trump's second government have become increasingly vocal about their unease with Elon's growing influence over US politics, with the billionaire given the role of creating a cost-cutting taskforce in the DOGE.

The department has so far fired or offered buyouts to about 100,000 federal employees, and has access to sensitive personal data relating to millions of Americans.

Many of the posters held up at the Bristol rally urged people to avoid buying from the company.

Tesla sales in Europe have fallen sharply in 2025.

Across the continent, they were down 45% in January compared to the same month in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association.

Meanwhile, the DOGE website provided its third weekly update of federal government cost-cutting Sunday night, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion it claimed in the previous week.

As part of these stats, DOGE listed a total of 2,334 cancelled contracts on its latest "Wall of Receipts," with the savings from those contracts amounting to $8.8 billion.

And while many oppose his actions there are millions who applaud his cost-cutting agenda.

Either way, Elon Musk has demonstrated in his business dealings that he is an entrepreneur to be reckoned with and he deservedly takes his place on our Wall of Fame.