Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil
Lamarr 1914–2000 · Antheil 1900–1959 · 1942
A piano roll, a torpedo, and a patent nobody used for twenty years
Lamarr was a film actor who had sat through her first husband’s arms-industry dinners in Austria and listened carefully. Antheil was an avant-garde composer who had written a piece for sixteen synchronised player pianos.
Together they patented a way to keep a radio-guided torpedo from being jammed: hop the signal between frequencies in a sequence both ends know, timed by a slotted paper roll of the kind Antheil used for his pianos. Jam one frequency and the signal has already moved.
The Navy filed it away. The patent expired unused, and the idea was reinvented and put to work decades later; spread-spectrum methods now underlie a great deal of wireless communication. Lamarr received almost no recognition in her lifetime and no money at all.
Nothing on this board hops frequencies, but the tone recipes are the same raw material: a circuit whose frequency you can change on purpose.
The thing you can build here
Siren knob →A tone whose frequency you steer with your hand — the changeable thing their scheme depended on.
Sources
- Markey (Lamarr) and Antheil, US Patent 2,292,387, "Secret Communication System", granted 11 August 1942.
- Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 1945.