This popular book was updated in 2013 just thirteen years after the death of the glamourous film star Hedy Lamarr. She was a famous Hollywood star and the first woman to appear naked on film. George Antheil was a piano player and composer. So just how did these two come to invent the latest technology used by the mobile phone? Or did they? She was labelled ‘the most beautiful girl in the world’ and he ‘the bad boy of music’ yet way back in 1942 they took out a patent covering the vital radio technique that we now call spread spectrum.

This absorbing book traces the eventful and sometimes scandalous lives of Hedy and George. It tells the fascinating story of radio and the ongoing battle to make it secure and of similar quality to wired communication. Spread spectrum emerged from that battle to become the solution of choice for anything from mobile phones to wireless computer networks.