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Torpedos and Music
Posted by Christina Mackenzie at 11/24/2010 1:38 AM CST

Many Ares readers will be packing their bags today to go and visit family for Thanksgiving. If there should be a lull in the conversation over the turkey you may like to bring up this tidbit which I came across while researching a story on torpedo countermeasures.
The modern torpedo, as many of you will know, was the brainchild of English engineer Robert Whitehead. But what you may not know is that Whitehead's grandaughter and heiress, Agathe, married an Austro-Hungarian Lieutenant Commander, Georg Ludwig von Trapp, a highly decorated submariner in World War I who had had occasion to use her grandfather's invention. She gave him seven children before dying of scarlet fever.

Some four years later he asked the local convent to send him a tutor to teach one of the children who was home recovering from an illness. The tutor's name was Maria, and the family (for of course Georg married Maria) eventually became the Von Trapp Family singers.

Their story was unforgettably, and not entirely reliably, told in, you've guessed it: “The Sound of Music”.

Stuart wrote:If you want another one, the actress Hedy Lamarr invented the basic technology that makes homing torpedoes work. You'll find the story here