Behind her, a jagged black line cuts across a grid like a signal jumping between channels — the visual shorthand for the concept that made Hedy Lamarr more than the era's most photographed face: frequency hopping, the rapid switching of a radio signal across frequencies so it couldn't be jammed or intercepted. Lamarr fled Austria at nineteen by sewing her jewels into her clothes and escaping her first husband disguised as her own maid, arriving in Hollywood to be recast, immediately, as an ornament — a career built on being called the most beautiful woman in the world, the visible inspiration for Snow White and Catwoman. What that framing missed was the mind at work after hours: with no formal training in engineering, Lamarr co-developed and patented a frequency-hopping system during the Second World War and handed it to the U.S. military for free. It was shelved, dismissed for the era's plainest reason — a woman, a civilian, no credentials that anyone in uniform respected. Decades later the same principle underwrites WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS, technology now assumed rather than credited. Lamarr received her first formal recognition for the invention in 1997, at eighty-two, decades after the patent had already expired and the world had already started using what she gave it for nothing.