http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/hedy-lamarr-biography-hedy-s-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html
How the world’s most beautiful woman helped invent GPS, Wi-Fi, and a homing torpedo.
Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy Lamarr achieved in that realm—revealed in Richard Rhodes’s fascinating biography, Hedy’s Folly—it’s a pity more of them don’t consider it.
In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What moved her to do this? “She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing,” Rhodes explains. Of course, there was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet’s only invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of water into soda.
How did a woman who couldn’t spell (by some accounts) make such signif-icant contributions to science? Born Hedwig Kiesler into a refined Viennese Jewish family in 1914, she dropped out of high school to act on stage and screen. In 1931, when she was 16, the director Max Reinhardt cast her in the play The Weaker Sex and called her “the most beautiful woman in the world”—an epithet that stuck. Two years later, she attained notoriety for her memorable (if fleeting) nude scenes in a Czech art film called Ecstasy. The film horrified her parents but thrilled munitions mogul Fritz Mandl.
