Oh, I am perfectly wiling to be convinced: up till now, no one has ever provided any evidence or sites. Poor duck, she sure couldn’t act, it would be nice to know she was good at something.
As fate would have it I was listening to a public radio interview with Nick Thomas, author of a book called Raised by the Stars: Interviews With 29 Children of Hollywood Actors, on the way into lunch today and Hedy Lamarr’s daughter was one of the ‘children’ he interviewed. Per Thomas, she was more than an interested amateur but the actual circuitry and “knocking it together” was done by her friend George Antheil, a composer/musician/machinist who had done pioneering work in automated music. She really did understand how the device worked and most of the mechanics behind it (i.e. it wasn’t just slapping her name on it like the Jack LaLanne Juicer or George Foreman Grill) but didn’t actually invent it, and it was hoped that her star power would help it get attention.
An irony, per Thomas, is that because it wasn’t used in WW2 or afterwards they let the patent expire. Had they renewed it then both her estate and Antheil’s would have earned tens of millions from its use in the cell phone industry.