Hedy's Folly The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
Richard Rhodes, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385534383
Summary
What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary invention based on the rapid switching of communications signals among a spread of different frequencies.
Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today. Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam- proof radio guidance system for torpedoes—the unlikely duo’s gift to the U.S. war effort.
What other book brings together 1920s Paris, player pianos, Nazi weaponry, and digital wireless into one satisfying whole? In its juxtaposition of Hollywood glamour with the reality of a brutal war, Hedy’s Folly is a riveting book about unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 4, 1937
• Where—Kansas City, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award;
National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in California
Richard Lee Rhodes is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), The Twilight of the Bombs (2010), and Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (2011). 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. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.
Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas. Following his mother's suicide when he was only a year old, Rhodes, along with his older (by a year and a half) brother Stanley, was raised in and around Kansas City, Missouri, by his father, a railroad boilermaker with a third-grade education. When Rhodes was ten their father remarried a woman who starved, exploited, and abused the children. Stan, age 13, standing 5’ 4” and weighing an emaciated 98 pounds, saved both boys by walking into a police station and reporting to the authorities the conditions under which they lived. (For these details and others see Rhodes’ memoir A Hole in the World.) The boys were sent to the Andrew Drumm Institute, an institution for boys founded in 1928 in Independence, Missouri. The admission of the brothers was something of an anomaly as the institution was designed for orphaned or indigent boys and they fit neither category. The Drumm Institute is still in operation today, and now accepts both boys and girls. Rhodes became a member of the board of trustees in 1991.
Richard and Stanley lived at Drumm for the remainder of their adolescence. Both graduated from high school. Rhodes was admitted to Yale University and received a Scholarship, which awarded him full tuition, room, board, and other expenses for four years. Rhodes graduated with honors in 1959.
He went on to publish 21 books and numerous articles for national magazines; his best-known work, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was published in 1986 and earned Rhodes the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards. Many of his personal documents and research materials are part of the Kansas Collection at the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
He is the father of two children, is a grandfather, and currently resides in California with his wife, Dr. Ginger Rhodes.
Nuclear history series
Rhodes came to national prominence with his 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a narrative of the history of the people and events during World War II from the discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission in the 1930s, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among its many honors, the 900-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (in 1988), a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies in English alone, as well as having been translated into a dozen or so other languages.
Praised by both historians and former Los Alamos weapon scientists alike, the book is considered a general authority on early nuclear weapons history, as well as the development of modern physics in general, during the first half of the 20th century. According to a citation on the first page of the book, Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi, one of the prime participants in the dawn of the atomic age, said about the book,
An epic worthy of Milton. Nowhere else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application.
In 1992, Rhodes followed it up by compiling, editing, and writing the introduction to an annotated version of The Los Alamos Primer, by Manhattan Project scientist Robert Serber. The Primer was a set of lectures given to new arrivals at the secret Los Alamos laboratory during wartime in order to get them up to speed about the prominent questions needing to be solved in bomb design, and had been largely declassified in 1965, but was not widely available.
In 1993, Rhodes published Nuclear Renewal: Commonsense about Energy detailing the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States, and future promises of nuclear power.
Rhodes published a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb in 1995, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II (Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others), the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race.
In 2007, Rhodes published Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, a chronicle of the arms buildups during the Cold War, especially focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration.
The Twilight of the Bombs, the fourth and final volume in his series on nuclear history, was published in 2010. The book documents, among other topics, the post-Cold War nuclear history of the world, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear terrorism.
Other works
John James Audubon, published in 2004, is a biography of the French-born American artist, John James Audubon (1785–1851). Audubon is known for his life-sized watercolor illustrations of birds and wildlife, including Birds of America, a multivolume work published through subscriptions in the mid-19th century, first in England and then in the United States. Rhodes also edited a collection of Audubon's letters and writings, The Audubon Reader.
Rhodes' 1997 book Deadly Feasts is a work of verity concerning transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), prions, and the career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. It reviews the history of TSE epidemics, beginning with the infection of large numbers of the Fore people of the New Guinea Eastern Highlands during a period when they consumed their dead in mortuary feasts, and explores the link between new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) in humans and the consumption of beef contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly referred to as "mad cow disease."
Though less well known as a writer of fiction, Rhodes is also the author of four novels. Three of the four are currently out of print, but The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party, his first, was reissued in a new edition in 2007 by Stanford University Press. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Rhodes’s talent is making the scientifically complex accessible to the proverbial lay reader with clarity and without dumbing down the essentials of his topics...along the way he expertly weaves social and cultural commentary into his narrative.... Behind the uniqueness of this story lie deeper themes that Rhodes touches upon: the gender biases against beautiful and intelligent women, the delicate interpersonal politics of scientific collaboration and...the neverending, implacable conflict between art and Mammon in American culture.
John Adams - New York Times Book Review
With admirable and tenacious skill, Richard Rhodes' new book on Hollywood screen legend Hedy Lamarr unveils the inquisitive brain behind the beauty.... [It] reads at turns like a romance novel, patent law primer, noir narrative and exercise in forensic psychology.... Rhodes...ends up shedding valuable insight on the Hollywood mythmaking of the era.
Adam Tschorn - Los Angeles Times
A focused glimpse into one actress’ remarkable life, and the rare mix of war, patriotism and intellect that fomented her unlikely invention.
Alexandria Witze - Dallas Morning News
If the subtitle of this book—The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World—doesn’t make you want to read, nothing we say is likely to change your mind. But we will add this much: Rhodes, who has written about everything from atomic power to sex to John James Audubon, is apparently incapable of writing a bad book and most of what he does is absolutely superior, including this tale that has Nazi weapons, Hollywood stars, 20th century classical music, and the earliest versions of digital wireless.
Daily Beast
Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy Lamarr achieved in that realm—revealed in Richard Rhodes’s fascinating biography, Hedy’s Folly—it’s a pity more of them don’t consider it.... Rhodes’s beguiling book shows Hedy Lamarr to have been a secret weapon in more ways than one.
Newsweek
[M]ost people were reluctant to believe that the most beautiful woman in the word had an invetor's brain; but one man who came to believe in her was George Antheil.... Richard Rhodes...is the perfect historian to describe the abilities of Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil as scientists and inventors. In Hedy's Folly, Rhodes is also very good on culture-rich Vienna...[and] the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s.
Larry McMurtry - Harpers
[Rhodes] once again interweaves moving biographical portraits with dramatic depictions of scientific discovery.... [He] proves adept at elucidating the science behind this invention and the subsequent development of spread-spectrum systems (which today enable the use of cell phones and Wi-Fi), but his particular genius lies in placing the invention within a tumultuous historical moment.... With crisp, unadorned prose and plentiful quotes from primary sources, [he] paints a compelling history.... [Hedy's Folly] proves a riveting narrative, propelled by the ambition and idiosyncrasies of the inventors at its core.
Nick Bascom - Science News
In symphonic control of a great wealth of fresh and stimulating material, and profoundly attuned to the complex ramifications of Lamarr’s and Antheil’s struggles and achievements (Lamarr finally received recognition as an electronic pioneer late in life), Rhodes incisively, wittily, and dramatically brings to light a singular convergence of two beyond-category artists who overtly and covertly changed the world. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Take a silver-screen sex goddess (Hedy Lamarr), an avant-garde composer (George Antheil).... What results is a patent for spread-spectrum radio, which has impacted the development of everything from torpedoes to cell phones and GPS technologies.... Hedy Lamarr is experiencing something of a renaissance, and Rhodes's book adds another layer to the life of a beautiful woman who was so much more than the sum of her parts. It will appeal to a wide array of readers, from film, technology, and patent scholars to those looking for an unusual romp through World War II–era Hollywood. —Teri Shiel
Library Journal
[A] surprising story of a pivotal invention produced during World War II by a pair of most unlikely inventors—an avant-garde composer and the world's most glamorous movie star.... Antheil died before earning any recognition for this achievement, but Lamarr, late in her life, did receive awards. The author quotes liberally—perhaps overly so—from the memoirs of his principals. A faded blossom of a story, artfully restored to bright bloom.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Hedy's Folly:
1. Author Richard Rhodes has evoked a powerful sense of time and place for Vienna and Paris during the 1920s and '30s. What struck you most about either of those two societies? What, for instance, was Vienna like during Hedwig Kiesler's growing-up years, especially for someone of her talent and ambition? How did her childhood shape Hedy, the woman she would become?
2. What was young George Antheil attempting to express with his style of musical composition? Why did he want to distance his work from the lush Romanticism of the previous generation? Why did he refer to his pieces as "Mechanisms"? How would you have reacted had you been at a performance of his avant-garde creations? In what way could you say that Antheil's purusits prefigured his development of weapons guidance technology?
3. Discuss the increasing brutality of Germany as it headed into the Nazi era. What was the nature of Fritz Mandl's (Hedy's husband) involvement with the rising fascists?
4. What was behind Lamarr's decision to leave her husband and to run off with only a suitcase of clothes and handful of jewels?
5. Rhodes claims that Hedy was no intellectual but rather a "tinkerer." How do you explain her ability to absorb and later recall the complex, detailed information on weapons systems that she picked up while listening around the edges of conversations at parties she hosted? How did her abilities and Antheil's unusual musical interests hook up to create their torpedo guidance system?
6. Rhodes writes that "Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and bring order to a world she thought chaotic." Was that truly her motivation? Is it true for most inventors?
7. If you have a technical bent, describe the nature of the spread-spectrum guidance system which Lamarr and Antheil invented during World War II. Can you explain how it helped point the way toward remote controls, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the cordless phones we take for granted today?
8. Why did the U.S. Navy dismiss Lamarr and Antheil's findings? One reviewer writes that he himself was first taken aback at the thought of Lamarr patenting a weapons system, saying it was like "being told that Ali MacGraw developed the science behind napalm." Was there (is there still) a sort of prejudice at work—or simply a set of realistic expectations as to where scientific capabilities reside? Might there be other reasons why the duo's invention was ignored for so many years?
9. A number of reviewers have remarked that, as biographies go, Rhodes's work offers little indepth character analysis of either Hedy Lamarr or George Antheil—and that the author is not really terribly interested in his two subjects. Do you agree or disagree?
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