The Hollywood Star Who Patented A System To Guide Torpedoes — Hedy Lamarr

Some stories unsettle us precisely because they have no clear villain. Hedy Lamarr's is one of them: a woman whom half the world applauded for her face while the other half denied her the capacity to think. And in the middle of it all, a patent the Navy chose to lock away in a drawer.

What keeps turning in my mind is not only the forgetting, but how hard it is to name. Was it prejudice? Was her idea simply too far ahead of the technology of her time? Or was it an industry that needed her to stay put in her pigeonhole of beauty?

Perhaps it was all three at once, and that is where it becomes interesting.

If you had to divide the blame for that half-century of silence among those three factors, to which would you give the greatest weight, and why?