Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She went to Max Reinhardt's famous acting school in Berlin during her late teens, and in 1933 she showed the world her acting skills and most of herself in the film Extase (Ecstacy), which quickly became notorious for its extensive nude scenes. The movie played in America after severe cutting, and in 1937 its leading lady went to Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer, of MGM, hired her and gave her the name Lamarr. Some people thought Hedy to be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, but as an actress she was overshadowed by heroines like Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn. In 1966, she published her autobiography, Ecstacy and Me. Hedy Lamarr married Fritz Mandal, the first of six husbands, in 1933. During their marriage, which broke up in 1937, Madame Mandl was an institution in Viennese society, entertaining—and dazzling—foreign leaders, including Hitler and Mussolini. Her husband specialized in shells and grenades, but from the mid-thirties on he also manufactured military aircraft. He was interested in control systems and conducted research in the field. His wife clearly learned things from him, because she and her co-inventor, George Antheil, later went on to invent the torpedo guidance system that was two decades before its time.

Hedy Lamarr's co-inventor, George Antheil, was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900. His parents were from East Prussia. After studying music at what is now the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, he went to Europe to pursue a career as a concert pianist, heading first to Berlin and then settling in Paris in 1923. He became one of the top avante-garde composers of the time, writing and playing machinelike, "mechanistic," rhythmically propulsive pieces with names like Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Jazz Sonata, and Death of Machines. His Ballet Méanique was scored for sixteen player pianos, xylophones and percussion and was first performed in Paris in June 1926, in a version that had only one player piano but also had electric bells, airplane propellers and a siren. It caused an uproar. Antheil knew practically everybody in Paris's literary, artistic and musical circles, but in 1933 he returned permanently to the United States. He became a film composer in Hollywood and a writer for Esquire magazine, producing a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and articles about romance and endocrinology. He even published a book titled Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology. In 1939 he set an article to Esquire about the future of Europe that proved impressively accurate: It predicted that the war would start with Germany invading Poland, that Germany would later attack Russia, and then the United States would be drawn into the conflict.

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