Hedy Lamarr, often called “the most beautiful woman in the world,” was a thriving 26-year-old in Hollywood when, in September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down and sank a cruise ship evacuating 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Seventy-seven drowned in the cold North Atlantic. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria who had been making America her home since 1938, was deeply outraged. She fought back by applying her engineering skills to develop a sonar sub-locator used in the Atlantic to aid the Allies. The principles of her work are now part of modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology, which led to her induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
