Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World - Richard Rhodes
Co-sponsored by the Museum of Performance & Design
What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? Pulitzer-prize winning author Richard Rhodes explains in this biography of a brainy sex symbol. Lamarr was an ambitious Jewish Austrian actress unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer. She fled to Hollywood at the start of WWII, bringing star-making good looks, a head full of weapons information, and a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to composer George Antheil at a dinner party culminated in a US patent for a jam-proof guidance system for torpedoes, the technology that led to modern cell phones and GPS. Hedy’s Folly is a riveting book about unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.
Richard Lee Rhodes is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, The Twilight of the Bombs. 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. Photo credit: Nancy Warner