Whether she said it in exactly those words is uncertain. The phrase appears in multiple accounts, and it has the quality of a remark that gets polished in the retelling. But its essential accuracy is hard to doubt. Fifty-five years had passed since the patent was granted. She had been asked about the invention repeatedly in interviews over the decades, and her interviewers mostly treated it as a charming curiosity rather than a serious contribution. The EFF award was the first formal recognition that what she and Antheil had proposed was not a curiosity but a contribution — incomplete, unrealized in its specific form, but genuine.
The same year, she received the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, given by the Inventors’ Clubs of America to recognize outstanding innovation. It was the first time the award had been given to a woman.
She died on January 19, 2000, at her home in Casselberry, Florida. The cause was congestive heart failure. She was eighty-five years old. Her son James, who had been close to her in her later years, later contested her will — unsuccessfully. Her ashes were divided: part scattered in the Vienna Woods, part buried at the Vienna Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery, where a memorial was erected for her in 2014.
George Antheil had been buried in New York in 1959, having died without the recognition that eventually came. His contribution to the patent is, even now, less widely known than Lamarr’s.
## The Hall of Fame, the Documentary, and What Myth Does to a Real Story