(Doubleday, $27)
“History has not been kind to Hedy Lamarr,” said David D’Arcy in the San Francisco Chronicle. Despite her ethereal beauty and a Hollywood career that spanned two decades, time has only dimmed the late screen siren’s star. Luckily for her, “Lamarr has an admirer in Richard Rhodes.” In this offbeat new biography, the Pulitzer-winning historian of the atomic age recasts Lamarr as an ingénue possessed of notable ingenuity. Whether or not Lamarr was “the world’s most beautiful woman,” as Louis B. Mayer once asserted, she was certainly among its prettiest inventors. In 1940, Lamarr, along with a collaborator, came up with the design for a radio-controlled torpedo that contained the germ of an enduring communications technology.
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Lamarr had ideas but lacked “know-how,” said Sam Kean in Slate.com. Antheil supplied it. While chatting with Antheil about how to aid the war effort, she tossed out the idea of a radio-guided torpedo that could avoid enemy jamming by hopping frequencies in synchronized patterns. Antheil devised the schematics, and the duo received a patent in 1942. Though the Navy initially rejected the technology, it was used during 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, and a version of frequency hopping today enables cellphones, Wi-Fi, and GPS to operate without interference. Lamarr, who died in 2000, “felt cheated of credit for these developments,” but Rhodes’s fond portrayal of her as a willful, tireless woman suggests that her own life was her most incredible invention.
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