Hedy Lamarr was an incredibly beautiful woman, an actress in Europe and the U.S., and a part-time inventor. With composer George Antheil, another occasional inventor, they patented a jam proof radio guidance system for torpedos in hopes it would be useful to the U.S. Navy in World War II. In spite of being a high school dropout, Lamarr was highly intelligent. She also had been married to Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer who allowed his lovely young wife to be present for meetings with the likes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Mandl did not realize that she had a near photographic memory and absorbed many details of the conversations about weaponry. Lamarr hated the Nazis and once she left her husband and made it to the U.S. she wanted to help defeat Hitler. Antheil, on the other hand was a struggling composer whose most well known work was "Ballet Mecanique," a work with instrumentation including several player pianos, an airplane propeller, sirens, and electric bells. Antheil had to figure out a way to synchronize all the player pianos. The technology he developed was used in the invention of the frequency hopping spread spectrum guidance system with Lamarr. Unfortunately the Navy didn't actually develop the system until the early 1960s, after the Kiesler-Antheil patent had expired. (Kiesler was Lamarr's real name.)
It's an interesting story but it is much more about Antheil than Lamarr. I'm sure this is due to the fact that Lamarr was a very private person after she retired from acting while Antheil was a shameless self-promoter who had written plenty about his work. Of course, if the book was titled "George's Folly" no one would be interested.
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