Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

by Richard Rhodes

What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum a revolutionary inven­tion based on the rapid switching of communications sig­nals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today.

Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam- proof radio guidance system for torpedoes—the unlikely duo’s gift to the U.S. war effort.

What other book brings together 1920s Paris, player pianos, Nazi weaponry, and digital wireless into one satisfying whole? In its juxtaposition of Hollywood glamour with the reality of a brutal war, Hedy’s Folly is a riveting book about unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Science, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Technology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Richard Lee Rhodes is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007). He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others.

He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 1 out of 5]

It annoyed her deeply, however, that few people saw beyond her beauty to her intelligence. "Any girl can be glamorous," she famously and acidly said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

This book really annoyed me. I was surprised and intrigued when I found out that Hedy Lamarr was an inventor. "Great!" I thought. "I will read this book about a gorgeous woman who invented in her spare time. It will be feminist and exciting." ... ... ... WRONG!

The book is boring and was also making me angry. Not an easy combination or a good one. The information we DID get about Hedy was a combination of biography stuff that had NOTHING to do with her inventing, PLUS icky stuff about how thin she was:

She was ill with influenza and lost weight, enhancing her already striking beauty.

Wow, that's one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard in life. Nothing like being too sick to eat or keep anything down to make a girl look even more beautiful and thin! Disgusting. This wouldn't be the last time Rhodes mentions how thin (read: gorgeous) Lamarr was.

Then we have this little capsule of repugnance:

George feigned embarrassment. Hedy pressed him: "The thing is, can they be made BIGGER?" "Yes," said George, blushing, "much much bigger!"

Guess what they're talking about? Yes, Hedy's breasts. That's just exactly why I was reading this book. To discuss Hedy's breasts in great detail. OH, WAIT, NO I WASN'T. Jeez Louise, you are really not helping with the amazing feminist feeling of pride I was hoping to get reading this book. I can't believe how much Lamarr's breasts come up here. Listen, I'm sure they were amazing breasts. But I don't want to talk about them, I want to talk about her BRAINS. Her brains and her inventions and her clever mind. THAT'S what I expect from this book. Can we focus, please?

Half of the book passes by before we even MENTION a hint of inventing. Which is shit, in my opinion.

And Rhodes gives us about five chapters of nothing but George. "Who is George?" you ask? Fair question. He's a composer that co-wrote the patent for spread-spectrum radio with Hedy. I didn't give a fig about him or his life or how many hundreds of affairs he was having while traveling - his wife at home with their child. And he has the most disgusting habit of referring to himself as "a bad boy" or "a very good boy" depending on whether he's cheating on his wife that month or not. It's sick and I hated every minute of it.

George also sneers at Hedy and looks down on her for a number of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that she writes her English and German phonetically instead of using proper spelling. Well, excuse me, George. The woman is fluent in 4 languages, she left home when she was 16 - you think you'd forgive her if she had no formal schooling beyond that. Fucker.

Anyway, in case it's not clear to you, this book was infuriating for a number of reasons. I recommend reading the title and the blurb. That should be just fine. No reason to bother reading the book, unless you want to look at some pretty black-and-white pictures of Hedy Lamarr, and you can easily do that on the Internet.

I'm so sad this was a dud. R.I.P. Hedy. You deserved better in so many ways.

[The Library Lady · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book suffers from schizophrenia. It is subtitled "The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr", but Rhodes does not manage to smoothly incorporate the two.

Having done a pretty good job on Lamarr's early life, he abruptly switches to the life of her co-inventor George Antheil. And while Antheil may have been a heckuva interesting guy, we don't need to hear about the ups and downs of his life as a composer, details about Sylvia Beach's "Shakespeare and Company" store and his life in Paris among the jet set or his relationship with his wife, much less long passages from her memoirs. His work with mechanized pianos IS important in his connection to Hedy, but again, we don't need all the details. Isn't this book about Hedy?

When we do get back to Hedy, Rhodes skims over her life at the time and gets straight to her invention. What follows is endless pages of background and technical jargon to delight any engineer as much as the initial half of the book would bore them--being about Hedy's life. It became so convoluted that all I could do was skim it and try to get to where it really explained what was going on--and it didn't.

Rhodes then jumps over most of the rest of Hedy's life--he mentions her divorcing her third husband, later tosses in something about "six divorces' and never details anything about that, then moves on to the end of her life, what happened to Antheil (again, more than we needed and I don't really care about the cute little anecdote about his wife and his son talking about the "old days") and other related stuff.

Hedy Lamarr was a fascinating person and for years her achievements were downplayed in favor of her life as an actress. The material here is terrific.But Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize or no Pulitzer Prize, didn't put it to good use. He has a feel for the technical, but not the flair for people that this book needed. Poor Hedy's been shortchanged again.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars

I don't know how to feel about this book.

I was super excited to read Hedy's Folly because its about such an interesting and underreported part of history. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress during the 1930's & 1940's she was known as The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Hedy's fame and fortune were built on her stunning looks but Hedy Lamarr was so much more than a pretty face. Hedy was an Jewish immigrant from Vienna, Austria who in her free time when not making films enjoyed inventing things. Hedy so loved her adopted country that during World War II, she and a friend George Antheil decided to invent something that would help American submarines avoid detection and hit there targets. They gave their patented invention to the U.S. Government and the Government sat on it for 17 years until the patent expired so they wouldn't have to pay Hedy & George for their invention.

Now you may be asking what did Hedy invent and why should I care?

Hedy's invention was something called Spread-Spectrum Radio, that technology would go on to be used to make Cell phones, GPS, Wi-Fi, and many other things. The U.S. Government sat on the patent and didn't acknowledge Hedy Lamarr for over 60 years.

That sounds like a fascinating story, but somehow Richard Rhodes makes it boring. Hedy was an interesting woman and her inventing partner George Antheil lived one of those stranger than fiction lives. And yet I was bored reading about them, because Mr. Rhodes sucked the life and fun out of the story. This was a short book so Mr. Rhodes would've had the space to dig deeper, for some reason he just chose not to. I hate giving low ratings but this one earned it, in fact I probably rated it too high.

I don't recommend this book, you should watch The American Masters about Hedy Lamarr instead.

Silver Screen Bookclub
Around The Year in 52 Books: A science book or science fiction book.

[Ann Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a disappointment. But I suppose if it had been titled "A little bit about Hedy Lamarr and a lot about some composer you've never heard of" not as many people would pick it up. Rhodes is so focused on the invention that we get whole chapters in which Lamarr doesn't appear at all. It's also disappointing that several times the story looks like it's building to some exciting climax--Hedy is gathering secret information she can use to blackmail her husband so she can escape, they're perfecting an invention that will make a huge difference in the war--but then just peters off. Hedy just packs her many many trunks and suitcases and moves to London. The Navy decides not to use the invention so it just sits in a drawer for a decade. I suppose that's the problem with writing non-fiction, but why build up to something that's not going to be there?

On the other hand, I learned some stuff (the inventors' council stuff was interesting) and it was short.

[Jenny McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry Summers Eat Your Heart Out: Hollywood Bombshell Hedy Lamarr Invented A Sophisticated Weapons Technology Between Films

What do Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Mary Anning, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Jocelyn Bell, Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin, and Hedy Lamarr (among others) have in common? They each made extraordinary scientific discoveries that went unrecognized because they were women, many of them having to endure male colleagues taking credit for their work, then winning Nobel prizes for it. Even Marie Curie -- sadly the only woman scientist anyone can ever think of -- was dismissed as little more than her husband's assistant, her Nobel prizes contested by fellow scientists. On December 10, 1911, Marie Curie won her second Nobel, the only person ever to win two Nobels in two different sciences, yet a hundred years later, in 2011, no women were among the nine Nobel winners in the sciences, and women remain severely underrepresented in the STEM professions -- science, technology, engineering, and math.

A 2010 report by the American Association of University Women, based on decades of research, concluded that bias and stereotypes still impede the female pursuit of scientific subjects from grade school through academia. Vivian Gornick's book of interviews with scientists, Women in Science: Then and Now, provides detailed accounts of the discrimination experienced regularly by professionals. Glaring proof of such prejudice was infamously provided by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University at the time, who in a creepy, eugenics-ish statement asserted at a 2005 conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce that women had "issues of intrinsic aptitude."

Summers's views echo Victorian British claims that female brain size was too small to grasp scientific subjects. Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, has been spending much time in that revered scientific institution The Royal Society of London researching his forthcoming book, The Lost Women of Victorian Science. The society's archives, as reported in a recent issue of the Guardian, have revealed that despite their presumed encephalic limitations, "women played a far more important role in the development and dissemination of science than had previously been thought."

Another Victorian, Alfred Lord Tennyson, famously declared, "The woman's cause is man's; they rise or fall together." While Julie Des Jardine's book The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science exposes male scientists' bad behavior toward their female counterparts, she also notes that women scientists wouldn't have gained the recognition that they did without the help of notable male allies.

Hedy Lamarr has found a notable male ally in Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Richard Rhodes. His delightful, explosive book entitled Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World has brought significant, well-deserved recognition to this woman's remarkable scientific achievements.

Continue reading this review at Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/the_bombshell...

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this well-researched book. It's probably half about Hedy and the other half is about her inventor partner George Antheil, a talented composer and writer. They developed and patented a radio frequency hopping technology during the Second World War. The sections describing it are technical, and I could follow the gist of it. However, both of their lives were colorful and turbulent, especially Hedy's. She was so much more than just another "pretty face" in the Hollywood movies, as this book convincingly and amply demonstrates. Her patented invention had important long-term benefits. There are probably better books about Hedy, but this one covers one large aspect of her life.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hedy " invented to Challenge herself or bring order to a disorganized works", and still made movies and looked gorgeous. I can barely wash my face, brush my teeth, and put shoes on every day

This is the perfect book for girls who think science is not for them. It proves that girls CAN!

Lenten Buddy Reading Challenge book #6

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other’s have said that the first third of this book is slow but if you’re interested in reading a who’s who in the arts in the few decades before the second World War, especially in Vienna and Paris, you’ll find nothing slow about the first section. They’re all here: Stravinsky, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, etc.* There’s nothing in depth about them…..it’s more a splash of color. The story is centered on Hedy and the very beginning of her acting career as well as that of her soon to be co-inventor and professional composer, George Antheil. They don’t meet until they both get to Hollywood however, though they moved in many of the same European circles. It was in Vienna that Hedy married her first husband who owned a huge munitions plant. He was involved with many inventors, engineers, and chemists and had them to dinners. Hedy was listening carefully and learning during these get togethers. Not many could see past her young beautiful face. They didn’t see her intelligence so they spoke freely about their work.

I’d heard rumors of Hedy Lamar being an inventor but always assumed it was a joke of some kind. It isn’t. Having lived as a Jew in Vienna and witnessing the coalescing of the Nazi Party, Hedy was anxious to help protect her adopted home so she and composer Antheil put their heads together to invent a torpedo that could be guided by sound transmission, an ever changing signal that could not be blocked by the enemy. Their patent went through and went to the US Navy where it was shelved. Amazingly enough their work was released to other researchers in the years following World War II and many subsequent inventions relied on Lamar’s work. Rhodes does a good job of putting some of the technology into layman’s language. I loved the picture he paints of Hedy choosing to sit at home in front of a drawing board working with Antheil between making pictures and Antheil writing movie music. Hedy defied the Hollywood beauty queen mold.

This is an odd book in that it doesn’t fall into a simple category. It’s about the arts in Europe in the 20’s and 30’s, the rise of the Nazis and the arms buildup, and it’s about Hollywood and a few idiosyncratic but multi-talented Hollywood insiders. The last part has information about music and it’s use in munitions functionality and the science surrounding that. It was a rewarding journey in my opinion.

3.5/5

*If you’re interested in the 20’s and 30’s Paris artistic community you might enjoy Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”. His movie makes this era come to life.

[Nicholas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Completely false advertising. A more appropriate title would be: The History of the People Involved with Broadcast Information Technology and a Study of Historical Developments in the Field. You know why they don't do that? Because no one would read it. There is about as much space devoted to the life of George Antheil in this book as there is to the eponymous Hedy Lamar, and yet there is no mention of the quirky composer on the cover at all. Those thinking they're going to get a vindicating revisionist history that explores the full life of an otherwise one-dimensional Hollywood actress are bound to be sorely disappointed.

After a promising start, there is a disappointing lack of detail. Rhodes opts for an overview of Hedy's Life with a penchant for exploring details of her film career and a half-assed retrospective on wireless technology that he hints owes its origins to Hedy's patented, but unused invention, but never successfully proves. Once the war begins, Rhodes chooses to focus on Hedy and George's radio controlled torpedo guidance system - giving the project and technology more life than the figure that graces the cover of his book. He slows down to describe in excruciating detail the way frequency hopping works and when he returns to Hedy, it's for brief catch-ups like the following:

Hedy's shock of war was less personal than Antheil's. She did not lose a loved one that summer, but she read and heard of murdered children, even as she adopted a baby boy, separated from and divorced her second husband, and shared with her friends Janet Gaynor and Gilbert Adrian, the actress and the costume designer, the birth of her first child.

That. After nearly an entire chapter on Antheil and his experience with the developing war in Europe, the death of his brother, his reaction to it, his financial troubles and problems with his patron. Oh yeah, by the way she adopted some kid and got married again or something. Moving on. What one would ordinarily think of as formative events in the life of an individual are all too frequently mentioned in passing. (The bombshell that Hedy was raped by a workman in her youth was only mentioned as part of a discussion on how psychoanalysis later in life caused her to re-evaluate things).

It's not a poorly written book, it's just incredibly misleading. Hedy is given a sense of agency. There is a sense that she's in control of her own life with a realistic portrayal of the difficulties facing such independent women in the early 20th century. The book suffers from about as bad a case of personality disorder as I've ever run into.

One star for the massive manipulation put into the titling and marketing of this book.

[Bronwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this book had been titled anything but what it was, I wouldn't really have any complaints. As it is though, I feel the title is misleading. I'd say only about half the book is about Hedy Lamarr, the rest about George Antheil and their invention. I understand that the invention having two creators means you have to talk about them both, but then don't make the book sound like it's about Hedy Lamarr only and her inventions. It's a joint biography, and really only one invention is discussed in depth (others are mentioned in passing).

That all being said, the book was easy to read and very interesting. My only other complaints are that it got bogged down a bit in all the technical information and the way the author sometimes writes. (Really, "A historian wrote", or some such? Call the historian by name, don't make me go hunting in the notes for every reference.) I'd recommend this book, but don't go into it thinking it's just about Hedy Lamarr.

[David Schwan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short history of Hedy Lamarr's an George Antheil's invention of Spread Spectrum radio. I spent a decade designing direct sequence spread spectrum radios for cordless phones, and was already aware of the underlining technology. This book gives some insight about where Hedy Lamarr got her inspiration. This book also gives us a mini biography of the American composer George Anhteil. I would liked to have read more about the invention but it appears that significant parts of the story are still clouded with national security interests.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hedy's Lamarr was far, far more than a pretty face. She was a human sponge, seemingly remote and beautiful but always listening and storing away information. Especially during her first marriage, to the head of a munitions company. It helped her to build a better torpedo, though no one knew that for years as the patented technology languished in the Navy's classified files. Finally, in 1999, she was recognized as being a Pioneer of Science. We should think of her every day, because her idea is the basis of much of the wireless technology: cell phones, computers, GPS and more.

This book is the tale of that invention, with colorful bits about Hedy's life in general, as well as her partner on the torpedo invention,and her very good friend, the composer George Antheil. The lives they led are fascinating even without the inventions (of which there were many--Hedy's invented things her whole life, and died with sketches on the drawing board for more). Reading this book is taking a very enlightening trip back to the 1920's through the 1950's where legends collected to create, talk, argue, invent and live the golden life. Beauty, brains, abundant talent, Europe, Hollywood,intrigue--this book really has it all.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there are many parts of this book that are extremely interesting, the style is rather dry. I did like reading about Hedy's earlier life but than the book just started throwing facts at the reader, almost too many, and I started skimming. That Hedy was beautiful, but would rather have been admired for her intelligence, was fascinating. The inventions she and composer George Antheil patented made possible many of the electronics we take for granted today.

[Tegan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was greatly disappointed by this book. It presents itself as the story of Hedy Lamarr as more than just beauty, but instead meanders all over history of those years in a poorly connected narrative. At least half of the book is devoted to George Antheil and his self-promotional life, including an afterword addressing his music and his family after his death. The rest of the book largely looks at Hedy as a woman who flitted through life, with out much exposition her her achievements and intelligence until the end of the afterword.

This is barely a book about Hedy Lamarr's work as an inventor, and only slightly more so about her "Folly," her "extravagant and consequential invention," on which the premise of this book is supposedly built. The book does have some very interesting information, but the narrative is dry and poorly held together, which is odd considering the apparent interest and enthusiasm for the related history that the author displays.

I will not deny that I felt some measure of relief after reading other reviews to see that my feelings towards the narrative were not unique. Hedy's Folly definitely touches on some interesting history, but when a book comes with such recommendations as "narrated with the rigor and charisma we've come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radio's genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world," I do not expect a dull book that is confused about which story it is telling.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

e drive
Read by Bernadette Dunne



Austro-American actress and mathematician, celebrated for her great beauty, who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age."

9 November 1913 – 19 January 2000

[Gail Cooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

It makes a remarkable story is the way the author describes Hedy Lamarr’s partnering with George Antheil “to invent a fundamental new wireless technology.” Indeed, it is a remarkable story and ably told by Richard Rhodes. Hedy’s Folly is a unique pairing in more ways than one. First, who would believe that the woman who owned the sobriquet “the most beautiful woman in the world” and created a scandal by baring all in an erotic 10 minute film scene when she was but 17 could possibly be intelligent enough to invent a technology that makes today’s cell phones and GPS devices possible? Why, that’s a bit like asking someone to believe that Marilyn Monroe discovered a cure for cancer.

Secondly, how likely is it that Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes who penned four books about nuclear history would spend time writing about a Hollywood legend? Quite unlikely you might say. Nevertheless, here is Hedy’s Folly, an eyebrow raising, absorbing true story.

Born into a wealthy family in pre-war Vienna Hedy was an inquisitive child, full of questions and encouraged by her father to pursue her interest in how things worked. Her first marriage was to Fritz Mandl, one of the wealthiest men in Austria who sold weapons to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. While that union was short-lived she learned a great deal by simply listening to dinner table discussions re technology as it related to the military. She was to remember what she learned.

After running away from her overbearing spouse and unsafe Austria (she was Jewish) she came to America and Hollywood. There, at a dinner party she met composer George Antheil who had come to Hollywood to write sound tracks for films. He was a bit ahead of his time, an avant-garde composer who had written a piece for sixteen player pianos. The two clicked almost immediately and began working together. (What other glamorous female star had a drafting table in her living room?)

When Hedy heard that a German U-boat had sunk a boat filled with children she turned her inventive mind to the war effort and together with Antheil came up with a torpedo guidance system for the Navy. While a patent for their invention was granted in 1942 at that time their idea was pretty much shelved. Nonetheless, today it is behind much of our modern communication.

Throughout her amazing life Hedy fought the idea of being just a pretty face - even though the most beautiful face in the world. She is quoted as having said, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand there and look stupid.” I think not. Nor could any girl invent a version of digital wireless. Hedy Lamarr was a remarkable woman; her story is astounding. Don’t miss it!

- Gail Cooke

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reader first needs to realize that this book is about a very narrow aspect of the life of actress Hedy Lamarr. Yes, it tells of Hedwig Kiesler, born in Austria before leaving her first husband and travelling to America to further her pre-wedding career as an actress. But it also talks of New Jersey-born composer, George Antheil, and how between them managed to invent a remote controlled guidance system using frequency hopping to prevent jamming.

The most interesting aspects of the book is not that Hedy liked to invent things in her spare time or that George created movie scores along with operas, cantatas and more including a musical score that involved multiple player pianos playing in synchronization. And it's not even that when the U.S. Navy received the communication system based on spread spectrum for evaluation in late 1941, they rejected in since the then-current system of torpedoes were 60% duds and they were more concerned about making the ones they had work rather than investigate a new, untried system. So the patent - bestowed on Lamarr and Antheil in 1942 - was set aside until the 1950's.

Frequency hopping became a foundation in sonobuoy work (which was classified for many years) but also for a number of secret communication systems - rocket radio guidance, telemetry, tracking, range and commands for the U.S. Air Force Deep Space department. Missile guidance and tactical navigation. Secure mobile voice communication.

Not surprising since so many advances in technology is derived from military discoveries but further development from spread streaming moves in wide or broadband, GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi, restaurant menu pads and satellite communications. All from the ignored patent of a Hollywood star and eccentric composer. Oh, they were recognized with the 6th Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in March of 1997 and it was just the beginning of the scientific world acknowledging their contribution.

The book itself does get to be a bit dry and if you don't understand carrier frequency and radio waves, the author's attempts to describe the Markey-Antheil (Lamarr's 2nd husband was Gene Markey) development and invention - even by using music and other comparisons - a bit hard to appreciate. Even with all the modern contributions.

2022-078

[Karin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Movie star Hedy Lamarr, who divorced six men, who had both beauty and brains, invented in her free time. She worked with writer and composer George Antheil to invent the basis for the technology used in much of modern communications, although it was originally invented in hopes that the US Navy would use it in WW II, which it didn't. This follows her life from the time she began her acting career, though multiple marriages, ending with her finally being recognized for it when she was already around 80 years old. I was impressed by how her father encouraged her curiosity, about how things worked when she was a child, her vim and vigour and her lack of interest in drinking or parties (perhaps in part because I don't care for drinking or parties, although I can't say that I've done any inventing).

This is fodder for a fascinating book, but the writing is boring, and too much time is spent on the biographies of a number of people. I wish it had been written by Erik Larson instead!

[Mal Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nazi Generals, Wireless Torpedoes, and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World"

A quarter-century ago Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for a masterful history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and he has received numerous plaudits in the years since, both for nonfiction and fiction. But I don’t see any prizes in his future for this half-hearted little effort.

There’s nothing lacking in the material. It’s relatively well-known that Hedy Lamarr, a stunning film superstar of MGM’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s, invented a secret weapon for the United States during World War II. However, the story — her extraordinary background, her flamboyant collaborator, and the the U.S. Navy’s ham-fisted response to their invention — was largely lost in obscurity and official secrecy until Richard Rhodes took it upon himself to write it up. I turned to the book with great anticipation — and was hugely disappointed.

The story is astonishing even in outline.

A famously beautiful young Austrian woman named Hedwig Kiesler, daughter of a successful Viennese banker, found her incipient stage and film career interrupted when she married one of the richest men in Austria, a munitions manufacturer who happily participated in rearming Nazi Germany and supporting the most extreme of his country’s anti-Semitic Right-Wing politicians. (Hedy — she used the short form of her first name even then — was Jewish, though she hid that fact throughout her life, and her children learned about it only once she died.)

Before she escaped from her first marriage, Hedy silently sat in on dinners and informal gatherings organized by her husband and attended by high-ranking Nazi generals and admirals. With an amazingly retentive memory, she fled with detailed knowledge of the Nazis’ most advanced weaponry — without her husband suspecting a thing, because to him she herself was just an object.

Soon after fleeing Vienna disguised as one of her maids in 1937, the year of the Anschluss with Germany, Hedy was recruited to MGM by Louis B. Mayer. Once in Hollywood, renamed Hedy Lamarr and dubbed “the most beautiful girl in the world” by Mayer (though others had previously tagged her with the phrase), she quickly became a major star. Although none of her films were especially memorable, they were successes at the box office and kept her in the limelight for many years.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to nearly everyone who knew her in Hollywood, Hedy continued her life-long passion for inventing in her spare time. Once war had broken out in Europe, she devised a concept for a naval superweapon — a torpedo guided by wireless radio, unlike the wired torpedoes then in widespread use. Together with her collaborator, George Antheil, an avante-garde composer whose concerts had sometimes caused riots in Paris and New York, Hedy offered the weapon to the U.S. government late in 1940.

Hedy had dropped out of high school to play a part on the Vienna stage, and she was neither a reader nor an intellectual of any stripe. However, she was clearly brilliant. The profound innovation she devised (with practical help from Antheil) was a system to make it impossible for enemies to jam the radio transmissions from the ship to the torpedo. This innovation, first called frequency hopping and much later spread spectrum, “enabled the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the majority of cordless phones now sold in the US, and myriad other lesser-known niche products. The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANS) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems.” Rhodes goes on for line after line, citing a plethora of additional applications of this seminal technology. In short, Hedy’s was one of those rarest of inventions that opened up vast new landscapes of possibility for engineers for many decades to come.

So, given the obvious appeal of the weapon she and Antheil had devised, one might think that the U.S. Navy, offered the patent in 1944 after seemingly endless vetting by a series of government scientists and engineers, would immediately put it into production. But no — the Navy classified the file top secret and stuck it in a filing cabinet. It was only discovered nearly 20 years later when an engineer working on a military contract chased down a rumor about Hedy’s invention, turned up the file, and began putting it to practical use.

A more nimble writer than Rhodes might have turned this story into a blockbuster. But sadly Rhodes devoted more space to the ups and downs of George Antheil’s career than to Hedy’s, and he goes on for page after tedious page about the mechanics of the wireless system, making the invention itself the principal character. Years ago, Tracy Kidder managed that beautifully in Soul of a New Machine. Perhaps as yet more information comes to light about this remarkable tale, Kidder or someone of comparable talent will do justice to one of the most remarkable women of the 20th Century.


(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)

[Samwise Chamberlain · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, but alas. While Hedy is on the cover of the book, I fear that the reason for doing so is to use her name and image to drive sales. The majority of this book uses Hedy as a springboard to talk about all the other men in her life and how these men contributed more to Hedy's inventions than she did. I thought the constant references to her physical appearance as crass at worst and unnecessary at best. (I.e. comments about her breasts, her weight, etc.). Much of the book focuses on the tabloid/gossipy portion of her life.

A good portion is also devoted to a silly little composer (self-proclaimed 'bad boy') by the name of George Antheil. Despite my background in music and composition, I had never encountered the name before. His autobiography, as true or false as a source as it may be, is one of the books most frequently cited. A financially struggling, philandering, experimental composer for film and Orchestra, his work in synchronizing pianos apparently is proof enough of his hand in the bulk of inventing.

Repeatedly brought up is Hedy's first husband, a munitions mogul working for Germany and Austria by the name of Mandl, and how it was simply Hedy's listening in on their conversations that brought about her ideas. Because despite knowing 3 or 4 languages and writing in a phonetic amalgam of all 4, she was "an incredible combination of childish ignorance and stupidity— and definite flashes of genius" Mandl would later escape to Argentina to avoid Nazi persecution, where he continued to make arms. Smeared as a Nazi sympathizer and universally reviled, he died in 1977.

The operative descriptions of discoveries made are actually fairly clear and well written. So I guess if you're looking for a book about Hedy Lamarr, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a book about George Antheil and WWII tech/weaponry, it's worth a read.

"I can't understand why there's no acknowledgment when it's used all over the world. Never a letter, never a thank you, never money. I don't know. I guess they just take and forget about a person."
- Hedy Lamarr

TL;DR: Lamarr and Antheil invent spread-spectrum radio guidance; Navy acquires patents and labels them classified; patents expire; navy gives technology patent to private industry; private industry makes massive profit; Public recognition of Lamarr and Antheil in 1997.

[Jaylia3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, driven and smart, Austrian-born Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr liked to spend her spare time inventing things. Since she had listened when her first husband and his commercial cronies talked about weapons systems and the armaments business at their fancy, formal dinner parties, Hedy knew a surprising amount about the working mechanisms of the submarines Germans were using with such destructive force in the early days of WWII, so when she met iconoclastic and perennially broke composer George Antheil, they decided to invent an undetectable guidance system for torpedoes and sell it to the US Navy. In spite of the title, this book is as much about George Antheil as it is about Hedy Lamarr, and that's a good thing because he is equally fascinating. Like Hedy, Antheil had a surprising amount of scientific understanding. His knowledge about endocrinology was the reason they met--Hedy sought him out to see if he could enhance her figure's proportions--and his experience trying to coordinate numerous player pianos and airplane propellers for his "mechanistic" compositions meant he knew more than the average person about synchronizing machines.

This is a little book with a lot of range--some science, some biography, some military strategy and maybe most interesting, descriptions of the intellectual and artistic climates of Vienna, Paris and Hollywood during the 1920's, 30's and 40's.

[JBP · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hedy's Folly is a short work of non-fiction from Richard Rhodes [he usually writes epics connected to science about the atom bomb] that looks at the unlikely inventor Hedy Lamarr, movie star from the 1930s and 1940s. Hedy's Folly is more a 2.5, but no half scores on goodreads, so I'm going 2 stars for this due to the fact that no matter how brief, it still feels a little flimsy as it unfolds. It almost feels like an extended essay to me rather than that of a book. She co-invented an early version of spread spectrum that allows for mass communication of wireless devices--you know, your cell phone--with composer George Antheil in the early 1940s with the idea it would help the war effort via wireless torpedo bombs from submarines. The US military never used the invention, but decades later their ideas about frequency hopping is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the communication worlds. Lamarr and Antheil never received a single dime for their invention. Yes, the pair of them, Lamarr an immigrant from Austria and Antheil an avant-garde composer, led interesting lives, but spread out over an entire book, no matter how short, tends to get a bit redundant.

[Rennie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is barely a biography. Half of it is about the man who worked on the patent with Hedy and who sounds like kind of an ass so I definitely didn’t want to read a book about him. She’s like a ghost in her own alleged biography! There’s a single sentence about her first child, an adopted son, who she effectively disowned. It’s written in parentheses. This is laughable. I googled it just quickly out of curiosity and everything that comes up indicates scandal of the highest order — apparently he WAS her biological son, by a man she would later marry and born while she was married to someone else. Wtf! One sentence about disowning him and nothing about anything else. Just one example. There are also like, paragraphs that just list movies she made that year or decade or whatever. What a garbage biography.

It’s a double shame because the beginning is mostly wonderful, well written and intriguing around her early beginnings as an actress and the dramas of her first marriage to a rich Austrian munitions dealer. And then it just falls apart so badly it’s hard to believe.

[Adam Tschorn]

Hedy Lamarr, a legend of Hollywood's Golden Age and siren of the silver screen who starred in movies such as "Algiers," "White Cargo" and "Samson and Delilah" in the late 1930s and '40s, is remembered today mostly for her exquisite feminine pulchritude. Think of her as the Farrah Fawcett (the red bathing suit pinup-poster version) of her day — a Viennese-born actress whose physical attributes earned her the sobriquet of "the most beautiful woman in the world."

And, in the seven decades since Lamarr's heyday, there's been no small amount of ink spilled chronicling nearly every aspect of her life and career. But there's a lesser-known facet of the actress' life that's rarely been focused on in much depth: Her penchant for inventing and how, in 1942, she came to be co-holder of a patent on spread spectrum radio, a technology that underlies modern conveniences mobile and cordless telephones, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. Put in modern context, it's like crediting Fawcett as the one who developed Google's proprietary search algorithm.

It's the kind of delicious disconnect that's at once intriguing and a bit hard to wrap one's brain around. Coming to the rescue is Richard Rhodes, fresh from three decades of working on a four-volume history of the nuclear age — one of which ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb") earned him a Pulitzer Prize — who found himself similarly intrigued. The result is "Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World."

Over the course of 219 pages (not counting the extensive notes and reference that follow) that read at turns like a romance novel, patent law primer, noir narrative and exercise in forensic psychology, Rhodes lays out how the young Hedwig Kiesler's (as she was known before adopting the more marquee-friendly last name Lamarr) inquisitive nature was encouraged at a young age by her father, and how her first marriage — to munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl (who also happened to be the third richest man in Austria) — made her privy to all kinds of technical talk. And though it may seem incongruous, he makes the case that Hollywood was actually the catalyst to Lamarr's inventive streak.

"Here was someone of intellect in Hollywood who didn't like to go to parties," Rhodes said in a phone interview from his home near Half Moon Bay, Calif. "[Hedy] didn't drink and she didn't like loud parties and drunken parties — and she had to find some way to spend her time. … It was her hobby."

According to Rhodes, Lamarr had an inventor's corner set up in the drawing room of her Hollywood home complete with a drafting table and tools, and in the course of her life had tinkered with a range of inventions including a fluorescent dog collar, a skin-tautening technique, suggested modifications to the Concorde airliner and a bouillon-like cube that would create a carbonated beverage when mixed with water — a project for which Howard Hughes reportedly "lent her a pair of chemists."

But it is U.S. Patent Number 2,292,387 (issued under her married name at the time, Hedy Kiesler Markey) that would be the crown jewel of Lamarr's side avocation. According to Rhodes' research, she met the man with whom she would collaborate and eventually co-patent the invention — avant garde composer, pianist and kindred spirit in tinkering George Antheil — at an August 1940 Hollywood dinner party hosted by a mutual friend — who happened to be famed MGM costume designer Adrian.

Their instant motivation, Rhodes writes, was the looming specter of what would eventually become World War II, and a desire, on the part of both Lamarr and Antheil, to help the U.S. military. Although neither one had formal training, by combining what Lamarr had likely learned during her marriage to the Austrian munitions maker with what Antheil knew from his efforts to mechanically synchronize a series of player pianos and similar projects, the duo developed a torpedo guidance system for the U.S. Navy that used a method of coordinated switching (or "hopping") between radio frequencies to prevent communications from being detected and jammed.

Rhodes said the goal of his exhaustive spadework, which included trekking to Mandl's Viennese hunting lodge and tracking down original correspondence between Antheil and his longtime friend and U.S. diplomat William Bullitt, was to tease out the nuances of the oddball collaboration between Lamarr and Antheil and how it resulted in their patent. "Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea," he said. "Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea. … Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from and that's interesting."

The book admirably achieves that goal but in his desire to locate and subsequently piece together as much original source material as possible ("Biographers have a way of leaning on their predecessors that tends to perpetuate mistakes," Rhodes observes), and — in places where no such material existed but there were two or more plausible versions or explanations of events — laying them all out for the reader, he also ends up shedding valuable insight on the Hollywood mythmaking of the era.

The "facts" about Lamarr's early life that Rhodes manages to discredit — or at least reopen for debate — include the circumstances surrounding her divorce from Mandl, when and how she came to be known as "the most beautiful woman in the world," and even the original source of her adopted last name, "Lamarr."

It's already earned Rhodes praise from one pair of critics. "The response from Hedy's two children [daughter Denise Loder-DeLuca and son Anthony Loder] has really been quite warm," Rhodes said. "They're delighted to see their mother finally portrayed fully as the interesting, complicated and creative person she was. The only thing they told me I got wrong was at the end it was both of them — Denise and Anthony — who carried her ashes back to Austria (Lamarr died in January 2000 at the age of 86 ), not just Anthony. Other than that they feel the book represents their mother rightly."

And, with any luck, Lamarr's children will be able to see that version of their mother represented on the silver screen, since the book's motion picture rights were optioned before it was even published.

As for Rhodes, he hasn't decided what he'll tackle for his next project and says he's currently casting around for ideas. "I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom."

But he's pretty clear about what isn't on his short list. "Certainly the one thing I don't want to do is write any more about nuclear weapons. I've covered that; 30 years is long enough."

[Joseph Sciuto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long before Hedy Lamarr became almost as famous for her inventions as for her movie career, I used to look at her movies and think that if ever I had to cast a woman who was beautiful, cunning, inventive, and super intelligent it would be her. I don't know if it were her facial expressions or her amazing eyes, but behind that lovely face there seemed to be a thousand different ideas running through, what we now know, was that ingenious brain of Ms. Lamarr.

Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer winning "The Making of The Atomic Bomb (a book I was never able to finish because, in short, it was above my grade level)" has in "Hedy's Folly," to his credit, chosen to concentrate more on the inventive, industrious, and determined Hedy Lamarr than on the glamorous starlit.

To his discredit, the book (especially at the beginning and toward the end) is confusing and difficult to understand, and if one is not familiar with many of the scientific terms he uses I imagine could be exceptionally bewildering. Luckily, since my failed attempt at his Pulitzer winning book, I have become much more knowledgeable about science thanks mainly to the works of Walter Isaacson, and was able to easily grasp the genesis behind 'spread-spectrum' that Ms. Lamarr and her colleague Mr Antheil so belatedly, in their lives, were given credit for... After their patent had expired and they were denied the billions, if not trillions, they were entitled to.

It might not have been the easiest read, but the information I gathered about this amazing lady was worth the trouble.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun and quirky lighthearted history, of the sort that makes you want to say “Ain't the world a funny place” or something equally profound. Also, it's short enough so you can finish the public library ebook before Amazon comes along and yanks it off your book reader.

Once her invention is invented, the book veers away from her life (supposedly the subject of the book, according to the title), so we don't learn much about her marriage, film careers, legal battles, and so forth. In addition, devotees of conventional celebrity biographies should be made aware that large portions of this book are dedicated to people who, strictly speaking, are not Hedy Lamarr. In spite of this, however, they are quite interesting. I recommend persisting.

Department of Cranky Fact-checking: At Kindle location 1595, the author says that the London Blitz took place on “... seventy-six consecutive nights between September 1940 and May 1941.” Employing all of my fingers and toes, I determined that there are roughly 200 nights between the end of September and the beginning of May, and that anything that started in September 1940 and occurred on 76 consecutive nights must have stopped, at least for one night, by December 15, 1940. In fact, starting Saturday, 7 September 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights (source: Imperial War Museum), and was subject to “major attacks” (more than 100 tons of high explosives) 71 times between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941 (source: Wikipedia, which refers in footnotes to Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War, which can be checked by going here and scrolling to page 102). If I can figure this out for free, can't someone earning a salary at Doubleday figure it out before the book goes to press?

This book was recommended and reviewed by the composer John Adams in the New York Times, 15 December 2011 – see here.

[Susan Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have enjoyed this book. I temporarily lost it in the car for a couple of months, but just found it and picked up reading again.
Hedy said "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." But Hedy's father used to take her for walks and explain how things worked. She became interested and her hobby was inventing. Her first husband was an Austrian munitions manufacturer who refused to let her continue acting and never let her go anywhere unwatched. She finally got free and went to the U.S. to Hollywood to act.
In Hollywood, she had a drafting table in the corner of her room. She and George Anthile, a musician/composer worked out a system for torpedoes to be radio guided and avoid jamming - a hopping frequency she called it. That idea was the basis for today's cell phones, GPS, satellites, etc. The patent was submitted to the Navy and they turned it down (too many other troubles with their torpedoes) and was classified for years, so she never knew exactly what came of it after the navy rejected it. Towards the end of the war, the navy decided they wanted to use the idea to triangulate on enemy submarines and a young engineer was given the plans to the patent. He assumed it was someone who worked for the Navy and had assigned the patent to them, not realizing it was not a patent owned by the Navy. His machine did not exactly replicate their plans, but was the same idea which Hedy and George had patented. Hedy also had other patents from things she had invented.
Time passed and a man who had come up with networking schools in Kansas using a bulletin board discovered her idea. The idea had gotten so big and he felt she deserved credit. She finally received an award for her invention (and George was credited, too). Then she received other awards.

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a woman and what a life! Richard Rhodes tells Hedy Lamarr's amazing life-story with a focus on the most famous of her inventions (spread spectrum and frequency hopping communication) and in parallel with the biography of her co-inventor American avant-garde composer George Antheil.

According to Hedy Lamarr, hailed in Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in the world, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

She certainly knew what she was talking about and was more than "just glamorous". By now almost everybody has heard about a Hollywood actress inventing the technique used in modern wireless communications, but a deeper and more detailed look into her story and the story of George Antheil is much more interesting, insightful and exciting than "look what women are capable of" memes.

[D.R. Oestreicher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hedy’s Folly by Richard Rhodes comes with the unwieldy and misleading subtitle of The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr… Her co-inventor was avant-garde composer George Antheil. The book is evenly split between the two inventors. However, following the 1941 story by the National Inventors Council story: “HEDY LAMARR INVENTOR, Actress devises “Red Hot” apparatus…,” Rhodes also ignores Antheil in his title.

This book is recommended for anyone interested in the 1920s, women’s or technology history. Though it jumps around and lacks a specific focus, it is full of interesting details and observations.

For my detailed report: http://1book42day.blogspot.com/2018/0...
Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20... for book recommendations.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this as a companion to "The Only Woman in the Room". It does put a slightly different light on Hedy's first marriage (she probably didn't have to disguise herself to escape), gave background on her inventing partner George Antheil, an American Composer, info about patent law and a bit of technical info about her patent, which - naturally - went right over my head. (I would really have to study to get it.)