November 9 — her birthday — is now observed as Inventors’ Day in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The recognition is genuine. It came from countries that had, in a different form, seen her leave at twenty-two and not return until her ashes came back in 2000.
She is buried at the Vienna Zentralfriedhof. The memorial placed there in 2014 acknowledges both her screen career and her invention. The patent number — US 2,292,387 — is in the public record, accessible to anyone who wants to read it.
Anyone who reads it will find two names: Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil. Both names belong there. Both contributions were real. The story of what they built together, why the government set it aside, and how the concept eventually found its way into the technology that now connects nearly every person on Earth is a story about the gap between what people know and what they understand, between what they see and what they miss, and between the recognition that arrives in time to matter and the recognition that arrives when it is no longer early enough.
Lamarr and Antheil did not build the wireless world. They described one version of an idea that, through decades of independent engineering work, became the wireless world. The distinction is real and it matters, and holding it carefully does not reduce what they accomplished. It only insists that what they accomplished be understood for what it was rather than for what later storytellers needed it to be.