I looked at my bookshelves for something to read, but couldn’t find anything that interested me. Then, who better to ask for a book recommendation than Wife Mary who has collected a rather nice collection of good solid books. The first one she pulled out was one by Marie Benedict - The Only Woman in the Room. She said it’s about a movie star named Hedy Lamarr who happened to be an inventor. I remembered something about her good looks on screen but also how she’d invented something concerning guidance systems for naval torpedoes.
The book proved to be a good one. Lamarr, born and raised in Austria, started working on stage plays and drew admirers, one of whom was an Austrian industrialist making weapons. She couldn’t resist his constant attention and married him. The marriage wasn’t happy for soon after the wedding his possessive, abusive nature revealed itself and kept her in out of circulation except for the frequent dinners he held. Those dinner guests included the Mussolini and Hitler crowd. Some of those conversations dealt with weapon systems, and Lamarr being of high intelligence understood and processed some of that information.
She escaped to America and became a Hollywood movie star, but in her spare time as a hobbyist, she devoted her energy to inventions. Out of that came a better system to radio-control torpedoes with a concept she called frequency-hopping that couldn’t be jammed to throw the torpedo off course. She educated Howard Hughes about better airplane designs to improve aerodynamics. Her developments have led to Bluetooth, Wi-fi, and more modern concepts at use today.
My wife always goes for books with a solid story. She also handed me The Other Einstein about Einstein’s first wife who was a genius in her own right and Lady Clementine, the woman behind the huge historical figure of Winston Churchill. I’ll have to continue raiding Mary’s bookshelves.
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