Hedy Lamarr is remembered most for the asset she valued least: her beauty. Richard Rhodes, himself best known for doorstop histories including 1986’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is out to change that with Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. The slim volume may not possess the gravity of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s four-part history of the nuclear age, but it certainly doesn’t lack for charm or contemporary relevance. For in addition to being a legendary screen siren, Hedy Lamarr was an inventor whose contributions to the technology that now surrounds us (you may be employing some of it to read this article) have largely gone unheralded.