12/5/12 review of book Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Here is my Twitter review of the book Hedy's Folly: the Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes.

This is one of my earlier Twitter reviews. It's from December 12, 2012.

Unlike my later threads, which are posted in a thread, this review was posted in separate tweets.

I have all the tweets below for convenience.

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Tweet 1. Finished reading Hedy's Folly, by Richard Rhodes. On the collaboration between Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil to make spread spectrum radio.

T2. Hedy's Folly spends a great deal of time examining Lamarr's and Antheil's separate lives before discussing their invention. T3. Lamarr is shown as a glamourous actress who escapes a marriage to a brilliant, but overly possessive arms dealer. T4. Antheil is shown as a headstrong avant-garde composer who is overly dependent on his patroness.

T5. Lamarr and Antheil are united through Hollywood and diplomatic connections during World War II. They want to contribute to the war effort. T6. So Lamarr and Antheil create frequency-hopping radio, to enable torpedoes to receive unjammed directional signals from transmitters.

T7. Rhodes questions the influence of personality and even aesthetic on the inventing process. It's very evident in L and A's patent schematics.

(I deleted a tweet here mentioning that I'd first learned of Hedy Lamarr after having watched the Andy Warhol film Hedy, where Mario Montez plays a parody of Lamarr.)

T8. Then I read a book on exploitation movie posters, including Lamarr's risque film Ecstasy. That book mentioned Hedy's life as an inventor. T9. So I decided to look more into Lamarr's life and found Richard Rhodes' Hedy's Folly waiting for me at my local library!

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I checked this book out from the Jefferson County Public Library system in Colorado.

Here is the link to the Penguin Random House edition of Hedy's Folly.