The memorial placed there in 2014 — the same year as the Hall of Fame induction — acknowledges both her screen career and her invention. It is a formal acknowledgment from the city that produced her that the full person, not just the famous face, deserved commemoration.
Vienna also observes her birthday, November 9, as Inventors’ Day, along with Germany and Switzerland. The date is shared with other historical significance — it is the date of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — but in the German-speaking world, November 9 carries the additional resonance of the woman who was born in Vienna on that day in 1914 and who, in the middle of a Hollywood career and a world war, sat down with a film composer and invented a frequency-hopping torpedo-guidance system.
George Antheil has no such civic memorial. He is buried in New York. His CBS theme for The Twentieth Century was heard, for thirteen years, by millions of Americans who had no idea who had composed it. His memoir, Bad Boy of Music, is out of print. His Ballet Mécanique is performed occasionally in contemporary music programs. He died at fifty-eight, in 1959, the year his patent expired, without having received the recognition that his collaborator eventually received and that he deserved equally.
The documentary made in 2017 was called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. It was not called The Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil Story. This is not a criticism of the filmmakers; it reflects the asymmetry of fame that has always shaped how the story is told. Lamarr’s face was famous. Antheil’s was not. Stories follow fame, and fame is not always distributed according to contribution.