There are signals moving through the air around you right now. Carrying voices, messages, data — your entire connected world riding on invisible frequencies at the speed of light. Your phone. Your wireless headphones. Your navigation system. The Wi-Fi router humming in the background of every room in your house. Behind all of it is a system. Behind that system is an idea. And behind that idea is a woman the world decided was too beautiful to be taken seriously. Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. Her father — a banker with an engineer's curiosity — taught her to look beneath the surface of things. To understand systems. To ask how mechanisms worked and where they failed. That habit of mind would eventually change the world. But the world saw something else first. European cinema called her the most beautiful woman in the world. At ...