Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible.
Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedy's Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system." Along the way Rhodes weaves together Hollywood's golden era, the history of Vienna, 1920s Paris, weapons design, music, a tutorial on patent law and a brief treatise on transmission technology. Narrated with the rigor and charisma we've come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radio's genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 08/07/2012
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.22w x 0.55d
ISBN13: 9780307742957
ISBN10: 0307742954
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Entertainment & Performing Arts
- Biography & Autobiography | Women
- Biography & Autobiography | Science & Technology
About the Author
RICHARD RHODES is most recently the author of The Twilight of the Bombs, the last volume in a quartet about nuclear history. The first, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.