In the midst of their contretemps, on 23 December 1940, George and Hedy offered up their most important invention, which they identified at this early stage as “Idea for a Radio-Controlled Torpedo.” The two “made blueprints, directions, explanations,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt, “and sent them off to the National Inventors Council. They immediately showed interest in the project and asked for further explanation, which was duly sent.”
The idea Hedy and George offered in this first iteration was not yet the Secret Communication System of their later patent, but the fundamental conception was in place. A ship would launch a torpedo, a plane would observe its trajectory; at regular intervals the plane would signal torpedo course corrections to the ship, and the ship would flash them to the torpedo. Between these isolated, brief signals, each sent on a different frequency, there would be radio silence among the three components of the system. So frequency hopping was included, but the hops were produced manually at intervals not of fractions of a second but of a minute or more. Not yet in place was the semiautomatic system using a modified player-piano roll that Antheil would contribute in the months ahead. But the two inventors’ submission offered a beginning, and the first hint of what was to come. It was enough, evidently, to claim the interest of the council leaders.
Like Hedy and George’s effort to invent a superior torpedo, the National Inventors Council had its beginnings in the torpedoing of a crowded passenger ship without warning by a German submarine. In the case of the National Inventors Council the ship was the Cunard liner Lusitania, torpedoed on 7 May 1915 as it was crossing from New York to Liverpool, with a loss of 1,134 lives, including more than 100 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson protested the sinking to the German Empire in the strongest terms; newspapers filled with stories of America’s lack of preparation for a war made brutal by dark new inventions.
Early in July 1915, Thomas Edison expressed his opinion in a New York Times interview of what the government should do to foster invention in anticipation of joining the war. The secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, a North Carolina lawyer and newspaper editor whose father had been a shipbuilder, read the interview and decided to enlist Edison’s help in meeting the challenge. On 7 July he wrote the famous inventor a letter. After a long paragraph of flattery, it got to the point:
One of the imperative needs of the Navy, in my judgment, is machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive genius of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare as shown abroad, and it is my intention, if a practical way can be worked out, as I think it can be, to establish, at the earliest moment, a department of invention and development, to which all ideas and suggestions, either from the service or from civilian inventors, can be referred for determination as to whether they contain practical suggestions for us to take up and perfect.…
There is no particular place, or particular body of men, relieved of all other work, charged solely with the duty of either devising new things themselves or perfecting crude ideas that are submitted to the department by our naturally inventive people.
The result of Daniels’s effort was the Naval Consulting Board, organized in October 1915 with a large representation of inventors, engineers, and industrialists, a few mathematicians, and no scientists, a profession the self-educated Edison resented and preferred to avoid. After ragging the Navy about its “mentally inbred” officers, the Wizard of Menlo Park agreed to become the board’s president. By the end of the war the board had reviewed more than 110,000 ideas and inventions, most of them submitted by ordinary Americans. Only about 110 passed the first two levels of preliminary examiners to be submitted to technical committees, and of those only one actually went into production, an instrument for testing pilots for airsickness. “Several others were developed,” the board’s historian writes defensively, “and might have later been used.”
Despite this dismal performance by “our naturally inventive people,” the Naval Consulting Board served as a model for the National Inventors Council that was organized by Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s close adviser, in the summer of 1940. Hopkins had been prodded to do so by a remarkable patent agent and theatrical producer named Lawrence Langner. Born in Wales in 1890, Langner trained as an engineer before becoming a patent agent for a London firm in New York in 1910. He left the firm in 1912 to represent the inventor and electrical engineer Charles F. Kettering. Kettering had just patented the first electric starter system for Cadillac; Langner represented him in securing patent protection in Europe. Success with that opportunity led Langner to set up in business in New York as a patent and trademark agent specializing in securing foreign protection for American clients.
The Welsh engineer was also interested in theater. He was one of the founders of the Washington Square Players, an ambitious amateur group that opened its doors in 1915; in 1919, as an outgrowth of the Players, he co-founded the Theatre Guild. Later in life, besides producing plays and musicals, Langner would co-found the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and the Westport Country Playhouse, all while continuing work as a successful patent and trademark agent.
In the summer of 1940, Langner had discussed the problem inventors faced in dealing with the U.S. government with an engineering colleague, Thomas Midgley, the co-inventor with Kettering of leaded gasoline. (As a high-school baseball player in Ohio, Midgley had identified the diluted sap of the slippery elm as the best substance for pitching fast-curving spitballs; many professional pitchers took it up. Besides leaded gasoline he was the inventor of Freon, the refrigerant that contributed greatly to the creation of the ozone hole. An environmental historian would describe Midgley as having “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”) “Inventors often lost a great deal of time in trying to interest the Government in their ideas and inventions,” a science journal summarizes Langner and Midgley’s discussion, “because they did not know which agency would make use of them, and as a result often sent them to the wrong place. Of all the places chosen by inventors to send their brain-children the one most often selected was the office of the President of the United States, where there is no agency for dealing with them.”
Kettering, like Edison before him a prolific inventor, agreed to chair the board of the new organization that Harry Hopkins assembled; Langner became board secretary, Midgley a board member. Thus positioned to respond to George and Hedy’s invention were three men ideally prepared to see its virtues. Like Hedy, Langner was experienced with theater and an inventor himself as well as a patent agent. Midgley and Kettering, working with Elmer Sperry and a group of other engineers, had developed a remote-controlled, gyroscopically stabilized “flying bomb” during World War I that had reached the stage of field trials when the armistice ended the war in November 1918.
By mid-May 1941, Antheil could report to Bullitt, with some skepticism, the first indications of interest at the National Inventors Council in his and Hedy’s torpedo:
And now we’ve received word from Mr. Langner, who is head [sic] of the council, and is in town, that he’d like very much to discuss the invention with us! Hedy and I are very excited, and we’re going to see him tomorrow morning at eleven. (Down in my shoes, however, I’ve an idea that perhaps Mr. Langner might only be interested in seeing how the beauteous Hedy appears in full life?)
Antheil was still smarting from his dispute with Hedy the previous winter; in his letter to Bullitt he made it ad hominem:
Hedy is incredibly childish about some things: for instance, she never learned how to write, either in German or English, although she speaks German, French, and English almost flawlessly. When she does write (I’ve caught her taking notes at our conversations) she writes phonetically—in all languages. She is an incredible combination of childish ignorance and stupidity—and definite flashes of genius.
Since Hedy dropped out of school at sixteen, it may be that she never learned to spell words by language. More probably, faced with writing in
three or four different languages, she had applied her gift for invention and decided it would be faster and more efficient to write them all phonetically in the notes she made for her personal use. Certainly she wrote and spelled competently in public documents. George Antheil disliked being questioned, as Hedy and Lou Eshman had questioned him, especially since he considered their suspicions unjustified. It also must have been difficult for him, despite his outward bonhomie, to spend time with a twenty-six-year-old woman who was living a life of wealth and fame while he scraped a living doing Hollywood hackwork in a community mostly unaware of his enlarging body of serious compositions—and while his beloved brother lay broken and dead beneath the North Sea, one of the first American casualties of what was still a European war.
Consistent with this analysis, Antheil invested at least as much time during the period when he and Hedy were working on their magnetic proximity shell and radio-controlled torpedo in promoting his theory of glandular criminality as a method potentially useful for analyzing the Axis leadership from afar. He pressed Bullitt for contacts, visited Washington for ten days at his own expense, and met with the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, members of Hoover’s staff, and FBI technical experts. Hoover assured him he was “deeply interested,” Antheil said, but nothing came of it. “I am very unhappy since my brother’s death,” Antheil appealed to Bullitt. “I feel that it is futile to attempt to do anything but help National Defense, nowadays. My mind is busy in a thousand directions; I have boundless energy, nowadays.” He had cured himself of his “Parisian asthma,” he believed, “through adrenal cortex [extract] and did not have a single cold all this winter and I WISH I could do something.”
While Antheil was besieging Washington with glandular criminology between sessions at the drafting board with Hedy Lamarr, Hedy was filming Ziegfeld Girl, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, co-starring Judy Garland, Lana Turner, James Stewart, and Tony Martin. Shooting began in September 1940 and lasted until January 1941, coterminous with the conception of frequency hopping. The jeweled peacock-feather headdress Hedy wore in the film, one of her biographers writes, “became her trademark.” It was an Adrian concoction, high camp, and one of his last; he left MGM in September 1941 to start his own business. Hedy, after filming Ziegfeld Girl by day and inventing by night, flew off to the Riviera early in the new year for a midwinter vacation. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was there; at his request, she briefed him on the state of European public opinion.
Hedy legally changed her name that winter, from Hedwig Kiesler to Hedy Lamarr. Her mother was now living with friends in London, and Hedy continued to pursue arranging her immigration. She also hired the Los Angeles legal firm of Lyon & Lyon to develop the Lamarr-Antheil patent application, which involved searching the records for possible prior knowledge and helping craft the most encompassing possible language.
Between 23 December 1940, when the two inventors submitted their first rough ideas to the National Inventors Council, and 10 June 1941, when they filed their patent application not merely for a radio-controlled torpedo but for a much broader, pioneering, and fundamental “Secret Communication System,” Hedy and George constructively reduced their invention to practice. Doing so was necessary to win a patent, because a patent requires that novel ideas be embodied in a mechanism that works. But again crucially: the particular mechanism described in the patent application need be only illustrative, one of a number of possible embodiments. Hedy and George chose to embody their idea in a player-piano-like mechanism because they knew how to design such a mechanism, not because it was the only possible system that their idea would support.
“Langner seems to be deeply interested,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt late in this second phase of invention development. “He promises to promote the matter with all possible vigor; he believes that it will work.” Langner had arranged the connection with Samuel Stuart Mackeown, professor of electrical engineering at Caltech in Pasadena. “He requested Mackeown to get in touch with me and work out some additional details,” Antheil wrote. “This was done, and Dr. Mackeown is now as enthusiastic about the torpedo anti-jam device as is anyone. He states positively that it will work.”
[NINE]
Red-Hot Apparatus
In the proposal that Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil sent to the National Inventors Council in December 1940, there is an important final paragraph that hints at the next stage of development of the ideas they described:
We are, at present, working upon a method of sending the radio signal from the sender-ship to torpedo which will incline to make it even more silent and undetectable than now, due to the actual sender-apparatus itself.
Around this time, Antheil carefully sketched and noted their “method” on two sides of an ordinary No. 10 office envelope. Their invention, he wrote, now consisted of “two sister system[s],” which he lists as “(1) Synchronized alternating radio wavelength devices for both sending ship and receiving torpedo” and “(2) Minimum broadcast time length device to double ensure torpedo against jamming.” Number 2 was the system Hedy and George had presented to the National Inventors Council on 23 December that depended on limiting the transmissions to brief bursts between stretches of radio silence to limit enemy jamming. Number 1 was the new system they were working on in the winter and spring of 1941, which Antheil listed as “synchronized alternating”—that is, the transmitter and the receiver frequency-hopped together in synchrony.
Now, however, in his literally back-of-the-envelope diagram, Antheil added a crucial new concept: “ribbons” perforated with instructions to the torpedo about both the minimum-time sequence and the frequency-hopping sequence:
(a) The ribbon wavelength synchronizer runs its perforations continuously, allowing sender to broadcast at any time deemed necessary—and as often.
(b) The ribbon wavelength alternator synchronizer has a predetermined pattern—impossible to guess at by the enemy—since it insures a two-way lock against such possible jamming.
So the signal that passed between the ship and its torpedo would now not only be extremely brief but also hop from frequency to frequency. And the hopping would be not manually controlled but controlled by “ribbons,” the general term Hedy and George were using here for a control device such as a player piano’s scrolling roll of paper. Once again, their notations make it clear that they were thinking beyond the specific mechanism of the player piano to a more universal concept of analog control programmed with punched tape.
Antheil had faced a similar control problem when he attempted to synchronize player pianos, and the mechanism he now proposed for his and Hedy’s invention was similar: using matching player-piano-like rolls of paper in transmitter and receiver with slots cut into the paper to encode the changes in frequency. As the slots rolled over a control head, they would actuate a vacuum mechanism similar to the mechanism in a player piano, except that instead of the operation culminating in a pushrod moving the piano action, it would culminate in pushrods closing a series of switches. The switches would be arrayed below the pushrods. Closing a specific switch would connect one of several differently tuned condensers—devices that store electric charge—to an oscillator. An oscillator is an electronic circuit that generates a regularly changing radio signal, called a carrier wave:
Each different condenser would impose a different frequency on the carrier wave—more cycles per second or fewer:
Antheil waggishly affirmed a range of up to eighty-eight frequency hops for the system, the number of keys on a piano—a musician’s sly autograph.
With a signal hopping all over the radio spectrum, and doing so not regularly but arbitrarily, more or less at random, the transmission would be impossible to jam because an enemy would be unable to follow it. He might accidentally jam one frequency if the signal happened to hop there, but with a potential for hundreds of hops per minute, the transmission would lose very little information from such minor interference. Anyone listening on a single frequency would not even realize a
signal was being transmitted, since he would hear, at most, only an occasional brief blip.
To make jamming even more difficult, George and Hedy proposed using seven tuning condensers on the transmitter but only four on the receiver. Three of the transmitter channels would thus send a false signal, one with no operating function, further complicating any effort to determine which transmissions to jam. Antheil’s hobby of inventing and breaking codes, which he had shared with his deceased brother, Henry, found application in this feature.
How much of the electronics of their invention Hedy and George designed themselves isn’t clear from the available record. Obviously, the player-piano-like system was George’s contribution. He also knew more than a little about radio electronics from his Hollywood experience recording his music for reproduction on sound film. “It’s my daily work,” he reminded Bill Bullitt once, “here in the studios, to know everything about microphones and sound-recording.” Hedy’s knowledge would have been whatever she had picked up during her years at the Mandl dinner table; as Antheil wrote to Bullitt, “Hedy was once married to a big Austrian munitions manufacturer and knows her munitions upside down.” (In the same letter Antheil noted of their torpedo that it “can be guided over twenty miles by radio,” which may have overestimated a torpedo’s fuel capacity.)
An important additional component, not original, was a “novel torpedo steering device—infinitely more accurate—and based upon [the] Philco Remote Control principle.” This electronic component would process the signals the torpedo received and convert them into instructions (in the form of electrical signals) to move the torpedo’s rudder to port or starboard to steer the weapon toward its target.
Here, then, was the invention in its semi-final form. What remained in the spring of 1941 was conferring with Mackeown at Caltech about the electronics of the system and working with Lyon & Lyon, their patent lawyers, to prepare as broad a patent application as possible.