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

I have to confess that my newfound obsession with Downton Abbey has really eaten into my reading and blogging routine. The truth be told, I actually finished this book early last week, but was on a DA bender and am just now putting thoughts to paper. (I also haven’t started anything new yet…)

Hedy’s Folly is a fairly slim book, and this review, likewise will be fairly slim. Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress (and reportedly the most beautiful woman in the world) in the late 1930s and early 1940s who like to invent any manner of things. Likewise, George Antheil was an avant garde composer (his most famous work having caused a near-riot in Paris) and notorious womanizer who was also mechanically inclined and liked to invent. Having discovered this shared interested at a dinner party, this unlikely duo set about to invent a jam-proof anti-torpedo system at the height of World War II. Naturally, the U.S. military failed to capitalize on their invention, but decades later when the patent was declassified, any number of private enterprises capitalized on their frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The technology has made possible everything from cell phones to GPS.

That’s the background story.  In this case, the sum of the parts is less than the individual parts. Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil are both interesting people, whose lives hopscotched from Europe to the U.S. (and vice versa) during the Roaring Twenties and Nazi rise. George Antheil lived in the mezzanine apartment above Shakespeare and Company, which is worth something in and of itself. Their stories, though, are often overwhelmed by the technical details of their various inventions. I appreciate Rhodes’s efforts to describe the scientific importance and how-to of their various frequency-hopping innovations, but ultimately, he often provided too much information for the casual reader to fully absorb.