IT’S THE OLD STORY: A glamorous movie actress and a brash avant-garde composer get together to invent and patent a device that controls torpedoes by radio. Naturally their foray into militarytechnology innovation affects the way defense satellites are designed in the next half-century.

This seemingly preposterous sequence of events actually happened, but it is as little known as it is improbable. I stumbled on it while doing research on the relationship between technology and music in the twentieth century. I came across the composer and concert pianist George Antheil’s 1945 autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, and found that in it he mentions his collaboration with Hedy Lamarr.

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