The Only Woman in the Room begins with Hedy as a young girl in Austria on the eve of WWII. As her family was Jewish, and seeing the upheaval in Germany, they persuaded her to marry an older man who they thought could protect the family. Fritz Mandl was a weapons/arms dealer and encouraged Hedy to give up her stage career, eventually imprisoning her in their opulent houses and castle. Bored and without friends, she began listening to conversations with dinner guests such as Mussolini and Hitler and found that their were problems with accuracy of the German torpedoes, but they were good at hacking into wireless communications.
After escaping to England and then moving to America with the help of Louis B. Mayer, she became friends with pianist George Antheil and together they developed an invention for frequency hopping. Although the navy rejected her patented invention, spread spectrum technology was eventually used for GPS and Wi-Fi systems. She was never compensated for her invention.
Sadly her love life was not as successful as her many films and she married six times.
Marie Benedict put together an interesting story of Hedy Lamarr's life, but I found the ending to be abrupt.
Hedy Lamarr was involved in many inventions. While dating Howard Hughes, she came up with a design for a faster aircraft.
