## The Name on the Patent
The patent is US 2,292,387. It names Hedy Kiesler Markey of Los Angeles, California, and George Antheil of Manhattan Beach, California. Those are the two inventors. Those names belong together in any account of this invention.
“Hedy Kiesler Markey” is a name that exists nowhere else in Lamarr’s biography in quite this form. She was born Hedwig Kiesler. She became Hedy Lamarr for the film industry. She took the surname Markey for a marriage that lasted two years. The patent captured her at this particular intersection of identities — the actress’s given name, the studio name suppressed, the second husband’s surname attached — and preserved her there in a legal document that outlasted both the marriage and the career.
It is a strange kind of immortality. The patent is available to anyone with an internet connection. You can read her name there — not the famous name, not the name on the studio contract, but the particular name she carried for a brief period in the early 1940s, attached to a patent for a torpedo-guidance system that was never built. Both the name and the patent outlasted everything else.
Antheil’s name is on the same document. He died in 1959 without knowing that the name would become famous in retrospect — or rather, that Lamarr’s name would become famous, and that his would remain attached to hers in historical accounts that often introduced him briefly and then let him recede.
He deserved better than that. He also deserved to have lived long enough to be asked about it. He did not get either.