That is a consequential story. It does not require embellishment. It requires only that two inventors — both of them — be understood in full.
## A Particular Kind of Childhood in Vienna
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. She was the only child of Emil Kiesler, a director of the Bank für Handel und Industrie, and Gertrud Kiesler, née Lichtwitz, who had trained as a concert pianist. The Kieslers were Jewish, and they lived in the Döbling district of Vienna, a prosperous neighborhood known for its villas and its cultivation of the arts.
Emil Kiesler was not a technical man in any professional sense, but he was the kind of father who talked to his daughter as if she were intelligent, which she plainly was. In later interviews and in her autobiography, Lamarr described walking with her father through Vienna while he explained how the streetcar system worked, how printing presses operated, how a piano produced its particular sounds. He asked her questions and expected her to think through the answers. Whether those conversations were precisely as she recalled them — memory is always its own kind of fiction — the quality of mind they describe is consistent with everything that followed.
Gertrud Kiesler had studied piano to a professional level, and Hedwig grew up in a household where music was not decoration but discipline. She took piano lessons from an early age. Her mother was a Lutheran who had converted before marriage, and her father, though Jewish, appears to have maintained a fairly secular household. The mixture of cultural influences was typical of Vienna’s educated Jewish professional class in the early decades of the twentieth century — assimilated, cultured, anxious about politics, and inclined to believe that good standing in Austrian civic life provided a kind of protection. Events would disabuse that class of the belief.