Hedy Lamarrs life has inspired stage plays, books, novels, films and even a graphic novel. She never did have the opportunity to use her patent, and the legal protection afforded by it ran out in 1959. Consequently, she never did receive any money from it, in spite of writing to the US Navy about this in 1969. Humiliatingly, before she became a US citizen, in 1942, her patent was even seized as 'alien enemy property'. The Navy, meanwhile, had used the frequency-hopping mechanism in ships and sonobuoys (A sonobuoy is a relatively small buoy expend- able sonar system that is dropped/ejected from aircraft or ships conducting anti-submarine warfare or underwater acoustic research). The great inventor's name also lives on in GPS systems, MILSATCOM military satellites and surveillance drones. I have found no better quote on the amazing screen goddess and technological trail-blazer that was Hedy Lamarr than the one used by Pamela Hutchinson, writing on women and representation in The Guardian in 2018: "If Lamarr's full story had been told while she was still working, or if she had ever played a woman as brilliant as herself in a film, perhaps the revelation that a star had brains, as well as beauty, wouldn't be quite such a, well, bombshell."
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