Hedy’s idea, entirely original, is yet clearly related to the eighteen different frequencies of German glide bombs (assuming she knew of this technology) and the eight different station selections on the Philco Mystery Control. In neither of those cases did the frequencies hop, but in both cases they could be selected manually and the selected frequency used to transmit to a synchronized receiver.
Another, and more charming, version of the origin of Hedy’s idea of frequency hopping comes from her son Anthony Loder. Hedy and George, like the skilled pianists they were, enjoyed playing the piano together. One way they entertained themselves was by following each other, one of them starting a selection that the other would then recognize and play in duet, an elaborate version of the game Name That Tune. As Loder told a Forbes reporter in 1991, “Antheil and my mother were sitting at the piano one day and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said ‘Hey, look, we’re talking to each other and we’re changing all the time.’ ” Hedy was free to contradict her son’s version of the discovery, and her choosing not to do so endorses its authority.
None of these precursors is mutually exclusive as a source of inspiration for Hedy’s original idea. All these partial models and many others besides may have been at work down in the creative ferment of Hedy Lamarr’s unconscious. Since she never publicly described the sources of her idea, there’s no way to know.
She did describe the next step to Amarena, however. “I didn’t know how to do it,” she told him. “I explained the basics of the idea, and the implementation part came from George.” Antheil was always scrupulous in attributing the original creative idea for their invention of frequency hopping to Hedy. In her comment to Amarena she returns the compliment, but in fact she worked alongside the composer to develop the idea’s implementation—in the jargon of patenting, to reduce it to practice. Antheil made that clear in Bad Boy of Music when he wrote of Hedy “doing me the honor of phoning me daily concerning appointments to invent a radio-directed torpedo” while he was batching it at the Hollywood-Franklin when Boski was away. Hedy made it clear in a 1945 interview with the military service newspaper Stars and Stripes, which reported her remembering “that she and Antheil sat down on her living-room rug and were using a silver match box with the matches simulating the wiring of the invented ‘thing.’ ” (The matchbox and matches were more likely simulating a target ship and the successive positions of a radio-controlled torpedo; Hedy and George submitted such a drawing as part of their patent application.)
The most general claim of George and Hedy’s invention in their patent application reads as follows:
In a radio communication system comprising a radio transmitter tunable to any one of a plurality of frequencies and a radio receiver tunable to any one of said plurality of frequencies, the method of effecting secret communication between said stations which comprises simultaneously changing the tuning of the transmitter and receiver according to an arbitrary, nonrecurring pattern.
This carefully drafted claim deliberately avoids specifying the mechanism for “simultaneously changing the tuning.” It does so to encompass as much territory as possible within the patent’s boundaries. Writing a patent broadly is part of the strategy of patent claiming. A system of whistles and tuning forks or a system of flashing lights and light sensors might serve as frequency-hopping systems. Because of the broad language of the claim, all would be covered by Hedy and George’s pioneering patent.
An old and classic legal text, Walker on Patents, condenses many court decisions into a description of what constitutes a patentable invention:
An invention is the result of an inventive act; it consists in conceiving an idea and reducing it to practice. An invention is the product of original thought; it is a concept, a thing evolved from the mind. It involves the spontaneous conception or “happy thought” of some idea not previously present in the mind of the inventor; it is the creation of something which did not exist before. Such is the mental part of the inventive act.
But the “mental part” of an invention is not patentable by itself. The new idea needs a physical embodiment. In the jargon of patent law, constructing that embodiment is called reducing to practice:
An invention is not complete by the mere conception of the idea; there must be something more than vague notions of some mode of application of the idea. Such idea is a mere conjecture; it creates nothing until it is reduced to practice and embodied in tangible form.
There’s an obvious tension in inventing between concept and embodiment. The inventor wants a patent framed as broadly as possible, to dominate as many variations of his invention as possible, giving him the right to demand a royalty from the would-be developers of those variations. But he must reduce his new idea to practice by embodying it in a mechanism or a material to qualify for a patent in the first place. A textbook on inventing explains:
The invention is not the specimen or set of plans that the inventor will have made after he has been working on his invention for a while; it is the idea of which this embodiment is the result. It will do the inventor no particular good to get a patent on the specific embodiment, because another inventor might start with the same idea and work it out in an entirely different form. If the inventor gets a patent with claims that describe just his own particular structure and no others, his patent will dominate just that particular structure, and no others. But some other embodiments of his idea might be as good as or better than his, in which case his patent would not have much value. In order to cover all the possible different embodiments, it is necessary to get protection on the original idea. To determine what the idea is, the inventor and his attorney have to explore and visualize the art in the vicinity of the new invention, to retrace the steps that the inventor followed in his original development, and to get rid of the cogwheels and levers and other mechanical elements, until nothing is left but the idea of a certain means used in a certain way to do a certain thing.
Reduction to practice once meant meeting the U.S. Patent Office requirement that the claimant provide a miniature working model of the invention to demonstrate its operation. The Patent Office dropped that requirement in 1880, allowing instead for what it called “constructive” reduction to practice, meaning “construed” or, as we would say today, “virtual” demonstration—drawings and a written description instead of a physical model. But the model or the drawings and description could be, and usually are, only one example of how the invention might be embodied in a working machine. There might be “cogwheels and levers and other mechanical elements” in the machine the inventor draws or builds to demonstrate how his invention would work in practice; but unless the patent is poorly drafted, the machine designed to demonstrate the new idea would not necessarily be the only way the invention might be embodied. The distinction is important. Hedy and George would come into conflict with the service to which they would offer their invention—the U.S. Navy—because the naval officers with whom they dealt failed to understand the distinction between their broad patent and the machinery they devised on paper to demonstrate how it would work.
Hedy had the idea of frequency hopping. She needed George Antheil to help her reduce it to practice. According to him, writing in his draft memoir, she chose him because he had some familiarity with munitions—a certificate preserved among his papers in the Library of Congress shows that Antheil worked for an unspecified period of time as a certified inspector of artillery ammunition at the U.S. armory in Tullytown, Pennsylvania, beginning on 12 August 1918.
It seems that Hedy had discovered that somewhere along the line of my perhaps not too nefarious but certainly varied past I have at one time been a government inspector of U.S. munitions. Albeit my knowledge of the same was at this particular moment a bit dusty, nevertheless I was undoubtedly the only “munition brains” available at that time, and Hedy had decided that I would have to do. Hedy, it seemed, had invented a marvelous kind of new munition which she wanted to perfect with me and offer to
the U.S.A. government.
If so, then her choice was fortuitous, because Antheil was also, and more significantly, something of an expert on making machines talk to each other in synchrony. He had tried and failed to synchronize sixteen player pianos in the early performances of his Ballet mécanique. He had succeeded in synchronizing four player pianos at his Carnegie Hall concert in 1927. In the fall of 1940, he and Hedy now proceeded to work together to apply that knowledge to the problem of creating a frequency-hopping radio signal and synchronizing its frequency changes between a ship or an airplane and a torpedo.
[EIGHT]
Flashes of Genius
Hedy’s divorce from Gene Markey became final in October 1940, just as George and Boski Antheil were moving into a rental house at 1246 North Sweetzer Avenue, on the flats below the Hollywood Hills. “We are, at this instant, engaged in hanging up some of our pictures,” George wrote to William Bullitt on 16 October, “a Leger, several Picassos, several Kubins, a Braque, several Marcoussis, etc. And we have just added several new pieces of furniture made for us by Adrian, the Hollywood designer. Both Boski and Hedy send their best to you. Hedy is a quite nice, but mad, girl who besides being very beautiful indeed spends most of her spare time inventing things—she’s just invented a new ‘soda pop’ which she’s patenting—of all things!” The “soda pop” was the cola “bouillon cube” that Howard Hughes was helping Hedy develop that eventually flopped. One price of George’s failed SEE-Note project had been selling two of his paintings in a poor market depressed by the war and the crowd of refugees from Europe who were selling their artworks as well.
Hedy and George worked together on their invention in the evenings through the fall and early winter of 1940, embodying Hedy’s original idea of frequency hopping in an appropriate mechanism—in patent language, reducing it to practice.
The basic problem of transmitting a frequency-hopping command signal between a ship or an airplane and a torpedo was that of synchronizing the transmitter and the receiver so that they could hop together from frequency to frequency. In the first version of their invention, the one they would offer in outline to the National Inventors Council in December 1940, they described a system that relied on human operators to coordinate the signaling, which the ship launching the torpedo would control.
First the ship would determine the maximum time its torpedo would need to travel from ship to target. Next it would add on a certain additional amount of time to allow for currents and torpedo and target maneuvers. Next the ship would contact the observer plane, and the two would verify the time total and agree on it. They would also agree on the intervals of time into which the ship-to-torpedo communications would be broken down, intervals when both plane and ship would observe radio silence. During those intervals, the torpedo would be running on its own on whatever course had been set for it.
Between those intervals of radio silence, however, in brief, “split-second” communications, “the plane overhead will flash directional corrections and the launching ship will immediately thereafter flash the correctional radio pattern over its proper wavelength for that particular interval.” Bundled into this sentence is the idea of changing frequencies each time another signal is sent to the torpedo—the crucial phrase is “over its proper wavelength for that particular interval”—but the two inventors fail to, or choose not to, specify a mechanism for changing the “wavelength”—the frequency—of the signal. They may have decided not to make their mechanism public, whatever it might be, until they had patented it. Or, more probably, they had simply not yet worked out what the mechanism would be.
The latter possibility seems more likely given the afterthought of the phrase. The archaeology of the creative process reveals itself in these layers, beginning with the first. Idea One: radio control of a torpedo to increase its chances of hitting its target, something U.S. torpedoes did not yet have. Idea Two: “split-second” radio signals between plane, ship, and torpedo in quick bursts between intervals of radio silence. Idea Three: changing the frequency of those split-second signals by some undetermined mechanism, adding another layer of complexity that a would-be jammer would have to puzzle through. The Lamarr-Antheil radio-controlled torpedo had reached this point in its evolution when the two inventors offered their ideas to the U.S. government in December 1940.
It was not their only offering. Hedy and George worked on at least two other inventions during this period besides their torpedo. “In the meantime,” Antheil wrote early in 1941, “Hedy’s finished off no less than three ‘secret weapon’ gadgets and sent them off to the National Inventors Council … and [we] have in due time received our serial numbers pending the War Department’s complete investigation.” The change in the wording of this sentence from singular—“Hedy’s”—to plural—the implied but missing “we” and “our serial numbers”—indicates that George as well as Hedy was involved in these other efforts.
One of them, the only one for which information survives, was an anti-aircraft shell fitted with a proximity fuse. Hitting a moving target such as an enemy bomber high in the air was an extremely difficult challenge for ground-based anti-aircraft crews. Thousands of shells had to be fired to swarm the area around and ahead of an attacking plane, and even with such a prodigal expenditure of munitions the chances of a clean hit were small. The American development of a radar proximity fuse at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, delivered to the military in 1943, was an achievement of even greater wartime importance than the development of the first atomic bombs. A proximity fuse detects a target and detonates an explosive shell at a predetermined distance away, turning a near miss into a hit. Accurate aiming is still a challenge, but far more enemy aircraft were shot down during World War II using radar proximity shells than conventional munitions. Such proximity shells saved thousands of American sailors from Japanese kamikaze attacks in the last year of the war.
Germany was working on a proximity fuse in the 1930s, raising the possibility that Hedy could have heard about such a device during her Mandl years. In November 1939, information on German secret weapons, including the proximity fuse, was passed to British intelligence by an anti-Nazi German physicist, Hans Ferdinand Mayer, in the famous Oslo Report he wrote out in an Oslo hotel room and sent to the local British embassy. The proximity fuse Mayer described in his report worked not by radar, which was still in a primitive stage of development, but by using the electrical phenomenon known as capacitance to sense the presence of a large conductive body such as an airplane. The fuse as designed was not successful; the German program was frozen in 1940 to give priority to other research and ultimately abandoned.
Germany did develop naval magnetic mines during the war, however, and like the German mines, Hedy and George’s proximity shell generated a magnetic field to sense the presence of a large metal body such as an airplane. George undertook to handle submitting the idea to the National Inventors Council in early November 1940, which led to a dispute in January 1941 between him and Hedy that threatened their partnership.
At some point in the fall of 1940 they had introduced Louis Eshman, the doctor who had bandaged George’s finger when he cut it with a razor blade sharpening pencils, into their inventors’ group as a witness. Witnessing to the stages of development of an invention as they occur is important to establishing priority. (Eshman may have been Hedy’s doctor and on loan, as it were, to Antheil when he wounded himself. Certainly the physician’s loyalties were to her, not to Antheil.) Having joined the group, Eshman soon began to suspect Antheil of withholding information about Washington’s response to the magnetic proximity shell proposal, something a person might do who meant to cut his partners out of a claim. When Hedy accused Antheil of such dereliction, he was understandably incensed.
In the beginning, the composer reminded Hedy in a letter he wrote to her on 10 January 1941, they had agreed to an equal partnership. He had not questioned the arrangement until lately, and he wasn’t doing so now entirely because of her. They had agree
d that he “was to handle entirely the matter of the anti-aircraft shell.” He did handle it as well as he knew how, he wrote. “It has not been my fault that (a) it has not developed as I hoped, and (b) that they in Washington have not sent you personal notice of it.” But “both you and Louis have made me feel, time and time again, as if it were somehow my fault that both (a) and (b) above did not materialize.”
Upset by this distrust, Antheil continued, “I found it necessary for my peace of mind to come to explain to you and Louis that it was not possible to secure an invention’s patent on these items, and to explain and justify my every step to date.” In the beginning, he added, it had not been necessary to justify his actions. “You trusted me in the beginning,” he told Hedy. “After awhile, and for some reason I shall not care to guess here, you do not trust me.”
The previous evening, 9 January, he had gone to Hedy’s house “just for amusement’s sake” to “show you both how unjust you have been with me.” What he did to show them is unrecorded, but whatever it was, Hedy responded badly. “I am terribly sorry,” he wrote, “that you have taken it this way because, as you know fully well, I am terribly fond of you, and if things had only remained as they were in the beginning, I would have gotten much further along in all this business, long ago, probably.” Which would at least seem to confirm that George and Hedy did not have an affair. Given George’s history, Hedy may even have introduced Lou Eshman as a chaperone.
Antheil would inform Bullitt later that year that Hedy “is a queer girl [who] believes that spies and saboteurs are on every hand, and cannot understand why President Roosevelt does not immediately put them all under arrest. ‘That is what we’d do in Europe’ she insists, excitedly. I then have to patiently tell her that this is America, glorious Democracy, the ways of which are not always clear to the apprehensive European mind.”