But the patent is more democratic than the documentary. The patent names them both. It gives them equal standing: co-inventors, both of Los Angeles County, both of 1941. It does not rank them or assign percentages. It says they developed the invention together and it lists both their names.
That document is the most accurate version of the story. Everything else is interpretation — some of it careful, some of it mythologizing, some of it somewhere in between.
The careful interpretation produces a story about a real woman and a real composer who identified a real problem, worked out a real solution, filed a real patent, received no benefit from it in their lifetimes, and whose concept became foundational to the wireless technology that connects the contemporary world. The story requires two inventors. It requires precise technical description. It requires acknowledgment of what the patent actually proposed and what the military and commercial world actually built from it — independently, years later, using entirely different hardware.
That story is more complicated than “she invented Wi-Fi.” It is also more interesting, more respectful of the actual people involved, and more accurate about how technology actually develops: not through single eureka moments but through chains of insight, engineering, failure, reinvention, and the slow accumulation of understanding that eventually produces things that work.
Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood star. She also co-patented a wartime torpedo-guidance system. Both things are true, and neither is enough by itself to account for the full life — the Vienna childhood, the first marriage, the escape, the MGM years, the workshop in the house, the dinner party in 1940, the paper strips, the spring clock motors, the patent granted and never used, the bond drives, the later films, the marriages, the shoplifting, the surgeries, the Florida retirement, the telephone calls, the award, the death, the ashes in the Vienna Woods.