Hedy Lamarr was, during her lifetime, famous as a film actress. She was also, as a sideline, a serious inventor. In 1942, with composer George Antheil, she patented a frequency-hopping communication scheme intended to keep radio-controlled torpedoes from being jammed. The U.S. Navy declined to implement it, filed the patent, and forgot about it. It was rediscovered decades later and became a foundation of secure military communication and, eventually, of civilian Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular standards.
Why it was unfashionable
Lamarr's technical contribution was ignored in real time for overlapping reasons: her public identity as a glamorous actress, her gender in a male-dominated defense-engineering culture, and the Navy's institutional reluctance to act on unsolicited civilian patents during wartime. Recognition arrived only in the 1990s, near the end of her life, when the spread-spectrum lineage of modern wireless protocols became impossible to ignore.
What the Age of Abundance inherited
Frequency-hopping and related spread-spectrum techniques are woven into almost every wireless link the Age of Abundance depends on — from Starlink uplinks to consumer Wi-Fi to the radios in autonomous vehicles. The connectivity layer of abundance rests on primitives Lamarr helped originate while her industry filed her in the celebrity column.
The pattern
Lamarr exemplifies a recurring failure mode of the prestige economy: it mis-files contributors by their most legible identity and discards their other work. The wiki treats the correction of that mis-filing as a legitimate act of historical maintenance, not a sentimental one.