Part of the answer is the structure of the mythology that grew up around Lamarr. She was famous for being beautiful, and in a culture that treated beauty as the opposite of intelligence, being known primarily for beauty made her technical contributions harder to see. The same quality that made her image commercially valuable made her intellectual contribution invisible. The studios that sold her face were inadvertently obscuring the mind behind it.
And part of the answer is that Antheil died before any of this could be addressed. He was the more technically credentialed of the two inventors — a composer, yes, but one who had spent years solving engineering problems in his compositions. If he had lived to see the spread-spectrum era, his voice would have added weight and specificity to the claim. His absence left Lamarr as the sole living inventor, telling a story that required technical elaboration that she could provide only partially.
The 1997 EFF award began to address this. The 2014 Hall of Fame induction formalized it. The Bombshell documentary brought it to a wide audience. And the popular mythology — Lamarr invented Wi-Fi — created a new kind of distortion in the opposite direction from the original obscurity.
## The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful
The name Hedy Lamarr came from Barbara La Marr, who had been called “the girl who was too beautiful.” Louis B. Mayer apparently thought this was an appropriate origin for a name he was giving to the most beautiful woman he had signed.