XVI.

Plausibility--

The Invention of

Secret Electronic Communication

            If a more improbable opening conversation has ever taken place, history has failed to record it. Hollywood screen siren Hedy Lamarr had read bad-boy composer George Antheil’s articles on endocrinology in Esquire magazine and had invited him to meet her at the home of Adrian, the dress designer. As Antheil himself, an admirer of P.T. Barnum, described the encounter in his memoirs:

 

  They were already sitting at the dining table, one of green onyx splashed with golden tablewear.

  I sat down and turned my eyes upon Hedy Lamarr. My eyeballs sizzled, but I could not take them away. Here, undoubtedly, was the most beautiful woman on earth. Most movie queens don’t look so good when you see them in the flesh, but this one looked better, infinitely better than on the screen. Her breasts were fine too, real postpituitary.

  The black silken ringlets fell softly down around her throat, and...oh well, why go on? You can get the same effect by going to your favorite movie theater and pretend you’re looking across the dinner table, just like lucky me. And--remember!--this picture is in technicolor.

  So I looked at her and looked at her, and finally I permitted my eyes to look down a little from her face. I felt a terrible flush spreading over my map.

  “But your breasts,” I stuttered, “your breasts--”

  I could not go on.

  She whipped out a notebook and a pencil. “Yes, yes,” she said breathlessly, “my breasts?”

  “Your breasts...” I repeated aimlessly, but my mind commenced to wander. I could not go on. I knew that in a moment I would swoon, but Adrian shoved a glass of water into my hand just in the nick of time. I wolfed it and said:

  “They are too small.” (I just said that to lead her on; every movie star wants larger bosoms.)

  Hedy made a note in her book. “Go on,” she said, not unkindly.

  “Well,” I said, wanting to get up and rush right out of the United States, “well, they don’t really have to be, you know.”

  She made another note, taking some time to do it. The butler took away my untouched hors d’oeuvres. Silence reigned, and I knew that more was expected of me.

  “You are a thymocentric, of the anterior-pituitary variety, what a call a ‘prepit-thymus,’” I volunteered.

  Hedy Lamarr kept on writing for a moment, and then said, “I know it, I’ve studied your charts in Esquire. Now what I want to know is, what shall I do about it? Adrian says you’re wonderful...”

  “Well, I said, “your breasts...they...so to speak...if you’re short on postpituitary...the thing to do is...er, activating substance...breasts can be controlled by...”

  (Oh, God, I wanted to die of shame.)

  “Go on, go on,” Hedy said, becoming a bit restless. “The thing is, can they be made bigger?”

  “Yes,” I said, “much, much bigger!”

  “Bigger than this--” I was afraid for a moment to look, but saw that she did not intend to take off her beautiful Hungarian blouse. She was just thrusting out her chest.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!” I cried.

  And that, no kidding, is the way I first got acquainted with our very good friend, Hedy Lamarr.

 

            And that, according to legend, was the origin of all secret electronic communication.

 

            To begin at the beginning, in the year 1900, several months before Max Planck invented quantum mechanics, George Antheil saw the light of day in Trenton, New Jersey, across from the state penitentiary. The proximity to the prison proved fortuitous: According to Antheil, his interest in music was first stimulated by “two old maids” who played the piano next door, day and night, a cover as it turned out for “one of the most sensational prison breaks” in Trenton’s history. Thus launched, Antheil developed into a child prodigy who seemed destined for a career as a concert pianist, and at age twenty-two he set sail for Europe, fame and fortune. Possibly. Antheil assures us he did not go to Europe in pursuit of a concert career, but in pursuit of a fianceé, a “well-edited version of Lana Turner and Betty Grable combined,” who had been spirited off by her parents when they discovered her ill-advised plans to marry the musician. Desperately in love, Antheil forgot the girl and soon became notorious for his concerts, which invariably ended with a few of his own “ultra-modern” works, followed by a riot. Antheil, it is an indisputable fact, carried a thirty-two automatic in a silk shoulder holster in order to fight his way out of the concert hall, should it become necessary. Whether he ever shot anyone remains unclear.

            The public did not riot because Antheil’s pieces were bad, though they may have thought so. A composer since childhood, Antheil studied at the Settlement School of Music in Philadelphia (he claimed Curtis Institute) and with Ernest Bloch in New York and, by the time he reached Europe, had assimilated all the current trends of modernism. Then he went beyond them. His “mechanisms” with titles such as “Mechanisms,” “Airplane Sonata” and “Death of the Machines” were at the forefront of the avant-garde and within a few seasons he was anointed the “first composer of his generation,” which he remained for about three years. No, in those days artists believed that progress was possible and audiences had yet to succumb to the fathomless boredom made possible by twentieth-century technology with its capacity for infinite repetition. Riots were the order of the day and nothing could be wished for more than a succès de scandale.

            Inevitably Antheil settled in Paris. In 1923, deciding to devote himself fully to composition, he moved with his Hungarian fianceé Boski into a tiny garrett above Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. The poverty was desperate, but the friends were James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and, above all, Ezra Pound. Their alliance proved mutually beneficial. Apart from his activities as poet and critic, Pound considered himself a composer and wrote a one-act opera, Le Testament de Villon, in a neo-antique, Stravinskian style. Whether Antheil merely “re-rited” it, in Pound’s words, or made it “virtually unperformable,” in the words of Pound adherents, is the subject of hot debate, but the opera has been performed. Work on it stimulated Pound to buy a bassoon and annoy Hemingway.

            To return the favor Pound, then kingmaker in Parisian artistic circles, wrote a book, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, which was meant to propagandize his ideas on music and his new friend. Whether Antheil co-authored it or was merely embarrassed by it, also remains the subject of internecine strife. Surprisingly for a work on music, it is filled with references to machines and the fourth dimension. “Antheil is probably the first artist to use machines, I mean actual modern machines, without bathos.” “Just as Picasso, and Lewis, and Brancusi have made us increasingly aware of form...so Antheil is making his hearers increasingly aware of time-space, the division of time-space.” Above all:

 

                        Antheil is supremely sensitive to the existence of music in time-space. The use of the term “fourth dimension” is probably as confusing in Einstein as in Antheil. I believe that Einstein is capable of conceiving the factor time as affecting space relations. He does this in a mode hitherto little used, and with certain quirks that had not been used by engineers before him; though the time element enters into engineering computations.

 

            Machines? Time-space? The fourth-dimension? What does this have to do with Antheil, secret communications and, above all, Hedy Lamarr? As it turns out, everything.

 

            Since the mid 19th century, when mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) had introduced the idea of higher-dimensional, non-Euclidean geometries, popularizers, including Hermann Helmholtz, Henri Poincaré and Lewis Carroll, had exposed the public to the idea of the possibility of the “fourth-dimension.” Speculation on the nature of this “fourth-dimension” became the rage in Europe, producing, among other things, at least one “hyperspace philosopher” and Edwin Abbott’s famous novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Indeed, fascination with the fourth dimension eclipsed the black hole mania that peaked in America around 1980, and reached such a pitch that in 1909Scientific American sponsored an essay contest for the best popular explanation of the fourth dimension.

            In those days, while Einstein was still an unknown patent clerk, the fourth dimension was conceived to be another spatial dimension, which however humans were unable to perceive, much like the six extra spatial dimensions posited in today’s superstring theories. (The single exception to this trend was H.G. Wells and his prophetic 1895 novel The Time Machine. ) Artists, as always, latched on to the latest scientific speculations and the notion that we really live in a four-dimensional world profoundly influenced the Cubists, the Italian Futurists, the Russian Supremacists and later the German Bauhaus architects, all of whom attempted to portray their subjects from a multi-dimensional perspective.

            In 1919, everything changed. After the eclipse expedition that made Einstein world famous (Chapter VIII) the fourth dimension became, for now and until eternity, time. Antheil and Pound, at the avant of the avant-garde, were not to be left behind in applying this new concept to music. As early as 1922 Antheil wrote in the Dutch art journal De Stijl:

 

  My forms are the first complete forms that have come out of the only forms out of which musical forms can be made...TIME. Is not TIME, and TIME ALONE the SOLE canvas of music?...

  ...Now I hope to present you not with an explosion, but with the FOURTH DIMENSION...THE FIRST PHYSICAL REALIZATION OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION.

 

            Here, we encounter the Panopticon’s best artifact in the permanent exhibit on Misunderstanding in the Aid of Progress. Antheil’s understanding of relativity may have been on a par with Deepak Chopra’s of quantum mechanics, but he remained undeterred in his attempts to incorporate relativity theory into music. How was one to do such a thing? For Pound, Antheil and colleagues, the answer was obvious: machines. Machines operate in time as well as space and therefore represented the ideal medium to express the unfolding of time-space. “Machines acting in time space,” wrote Pound, “and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time space. Antheil has used them effectively. That is a fait accompli and the academicians can worry over it if they like.”

            At least it would be a fait accompli. Later, Antheil denied that his works attempted to portray machines, but early on, it was otherwise: “I saw thousands of electric lamps strung in the heavens and illuminated from one switchboard to create God; vast cinemas projected a new dimension in the skies; music machines large enough to vibrate whole cities. All these although later appropriated were first my very own. The ecstatic poetry of space! The satisfying hardness of time!”

            The ecstasy of machines. Relativity, machines, time-space. All these influences converged in the artists of the age to result in the machine aesthetic so characteristic of the 1920s. In music, Antheil was demonstrably first, despite the fact that Honneger, Mosolov and Prokofiev received the greater accolades. In painting, it was Fernand Léger who epitomized the mechanization of the age and so, inevitably, the two revolutionaries would combine forces, with Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, to produce the first abstract film, the Ballet Mécanique.

            Antheil’s original 1925 score for the short film called for sixteen synchronized player pianos. With the technology of the day, such a feat proved impossible and he rewrote the score for a single player piano and an assortment of percussion, sirens, buzzers and an airplane propeller. Still, the music turned out to be twice as long as the film and so the two creations assumed separate lives. In its Paris and New York premieres, Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique , with its complete overthrow of traditional instrumentation, provoked, naturally, riots. But it remains an indisputable masterpiece, Antheil’s best work and the first concert work to incorporate a player piano.

 

            The Ballet proved to be the pinnacle of Antheil’s career, in terms of vision, quality and notoriety. From then on his music became progressively more conservative and less distinguished. By the early 1930s, he was out of fashion, broke as usual. Neither did the situation in Europe appear promising: Pound no longer championed him and Hitler was rising to power. In 1933 Antheil decided to return to the United States.

            But Antheil, with his facile if not very deep mind, was a hard man to corner. In his perpetual attempts get rich, he patented a revolutionary “See Note” system, an instantaneous method for learning piano. Eschewing conventional notation, Antheil ruled paper to resemble an actual piano keyboard; the position of the notes was where you would place your fingers, and a note’s duration was indicated by its actual length on the paper. One read not across but downward. In a word, Antheil’s system resembled nothing so much as player-piano roll, and the notation, like player-piano holes, was essentially digital: on-off, on-off. He published a pair of articles about his revolutionary system in 1938, in the newly founded Esquire magazine, but the revolution flopped utterly and completely. Aside from the sheer unlikelihood of such an approach overthrowing tradition, Antheil had forgotten an essential ingredient: compatibility. The system might have worked for piano. What if you played the bassoon?

            “See Note” was a minor diversion. Years earlier in Berlin, he tells us, a roommate had bequeathed him some books on endocrinology by Columbia University professor Louis Berman and, starving and with nothing substantial to nourish him, Antheil fed ravenously. Starvation is a wonderful thing; how lucid it makes the mind. Berman’s theory was simple: hormones are destiny. So taken was Antheil by this simple reduction that he wrote a book himself, Every Man His Own Detective, A Study in Glandular Criminology, which was published in 1937. It explained how an “endocrine criminologist” visiting a crime scene could by surveying the forensic evidence immediately determine what hormonal type had perpetrated the crime. The thymocentric is the most dangerous type--over 70% of all prisoners in our penitentiaries (especially Trenton’s) are regulated by the thymus gland, and therefore we should spend 70% of our time studying the thymocentric, who is usually hyphenated. To elucidate, the other endocrine glands come into play and so we have the thymocentric-pituitary, the thymocentric adrenal and so on. Remember, the thymo is a bad hombre and always shoots and knifes in the back. Robert James, however, that human devil who had bound his wife to a table, thrust her legs into a cage filled with rattlesnakes and threw her still alive into a garden pool, was a pituitocentric.

            So serious was Antheil’s belief in endocrinology that, according to one unimpeachable rumor, the Parisian police made him an honorary lifetime member. To be sure, around 1930 under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop he wrote a detective novel Death in the Dark. Antheil assures us that the manuscript was edited on the Italian Riviera by Pound, T.S. Eliot, Y.B. Yeats and Gerhard Hauptmann; it was inexplicably published by Eliot at Faber and Faber. Although the mystery in Death in the Dark may be solved by endocrinological means, the book remains virtually unreadable, which shows the wisdom of writing by committee, even when two of the committee members have won the Nobel Prize.

            The most visible of Antheil’s writings on endocrinology, however, were the articles he published in Esquire in 1936. These pieces, entitled “Glands on a Hobby Horse,” “Glandbook for the Questing Male” and “The Glandbook in Practical Use,” did not concern criminology. They concerned how to pick up women. By today’s standards they are strangely premonitory--witness current ads for hormonal breast-enhancement cream. They are also perhaps not as in bad taste as Jerry Springer, advising the reader that the “Type A” woman is dominated by the postpituitary (excessive), and rating her accessibility as extremely high with a strong tendency to nymphomania. The charts, ranging from A to D with subclasses, detail all “outstanding characteristics at twenty feet”: walk, build, height and bust.

            At about the same time the articles appeared, Antheil, in his perpetual state of impoverishment, made the ultimate sacrifice and moved to Hollywood to write movie music. He remained in la-la land for the rest of his life, productively if anonymously, writing the scores for any number of films. Cecile B. De Mille’s Plainsman is probably the most famous. Catch the ferocious war dance as the Indians roast Gary Cooper on late-night TV.

            Hollywood did have its compensations: By 1940 and the outbreak of World War II, Antheil’s Esquire articles had fallen into the hands of a young Hollywood superstar who was desperate to increase her bustline.

 

            Hedy Lamarr’s career had been shorter, but scarcely less eccentric than Antheil’s. An Austrian, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna, in 1915, 1914 or 1913, depending on who you believe. By the age of 14 (15, 16), she had decided on a theatrical career, her parents granted the request and she played a few bit parts in films shot at the local studio. Afterwards, she briefly attended Max Rheinhardt’s famous dramatic school in Berlin. The turning point in her life came in 1932 when she was chosen to star in the Czechoslovakian silent film Ecstasy, which included cinema’s first, or at least most notorious, nude scene--a few seconds of Hedy scampering through a glade and diving into a sylvan pool. According to her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, she was tricked into doing the scene; the director had agreed to place the cameras on a distant hill, but had not told her that he would be using a telephoto lens. It should also be pointed out that she later sued the publisher of Ecstasy and Me for $23 million, claiming she did not write it. Suing anyone who mentioned her in public became a lifelong habit.

            The movie made her notorious. By the time Ecstasy was released in 1933, her great beauty--certainly not her acting--had already brought her to the eye of Fritz Mandl, who courted her and married her the same year. Mandl was the owner of Hirstenberger Patronen-Fabrick Industries, Austria’s leading munitions manufacturer, and a Nazi sympathizer. Hans-Joachim Braun, writing for American Heritage of Invention and Technology, describes the nature of Mandl’s dealings. Like Antheil, he was born in 1900. When the Versailles Treaty after World War I forbade weapons manufacture in Austria, Mandl (who had by then taken over his father’s business) set up subsidiaries in Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. When he was caught selling weapons to Hungary in contravention of the treaty, he turned around and began selling them to Spain, during the Civil War. So willing was he to do business with anyone, anywhere and at any time, that the Nazis confiscated his firm even before the Anschluss of 1938, which joined Austria to Germany. At that point he moved to Argentina and became an advisor to Juan Perón.

            One must question Hedy’s judgment in marrying such a man, which required her to host Hitler and Mussolini, but she was only 17 (18, 19) at the time. Despite the palatial splendor in which she lived, she appears to have been somewhat terrified of her husband. At one point she tried to sneak out on her own and Mandl followed. Hedy ducked into an empty room in a brothel to escape him; a customer entered as Mandl was heard pounding on the doors behind her. By her own admission, Hedy had always been oversexed, and rather than face Mandl’s wrath, she obliged the customer. On the other hand, she did sue the publisher.

            The marriage had its bright spots. Mandl spent two years trying to buy up every print of Ecstasy in existence, but also allowed his young wife to sit in on the firm’s business and planning sessions, which included design of aircraft control-guidance systems. He may have thought she understood nothing, but apart from being “the most beautiful woman who ever graced the silver screen,” she was a smart, if kookie, cookie. In spite of such romantic interludes, the marriage did not last long. In 1937, Hedy hired a new maid who resembled her, one day drugged her and, disguised in the maid’s uniform, fled to Paris. Then she divorced Mandl on grounds of desertion.

            From Paris, Hedy Kiesler went on to London, where she met Louis B. Mayer, of MGM. After remarking that “her chest was bigger than he thought,” he offered her a job at his Hollywood studio for $125 a week. He renamed her Hedy Lamarr.

 

            The night following their initial encounter, George met Hedy at her mansion and this time the discussion turned to the war. Hedy, already one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, was nevertheless unhappy making a fortune while the world she knew was in flames. She let drop that she was thinking of quitting MGM and moving to Washington D.C., where would offer her services to the newly established National Inventor’s Council. “They could just have me around,” she volunteered, “and ask me questions.”

            Naturally, Antheil wanted to know what good that would do, and now Hedy revealed that she was good at inventing weapons. One of her ideas was for a torpedo guidance system. When you launch a torpedo at an enemy ship, you want to be able to guide it to the target; at the same time you do not want the enemy to be able to intercept the missile and divert it--or turn it around. You need a secure guidance system. Hedy called her proposal “frequency hopping”: If you had a transmitter that shifted frequencies in a prescribed, pseudo-random fashion, and a receiver hopping around in synchrony with it, then the receiver could pick up the guidance instructions without difficulty, but any surreptitious eavesdropping would be impossible. An enemy listening in on any one frequency would only hear a “blip” as the signal passed through that band.

            Hedy did not have the necessary technical background to put the idea into practice. Neither did George, exactly, but he immediately saw the solution: player pianos. The transmitter and receiver could be synchronized by controlling them with two player-piano rolls, punched with identical, random, patterns of holes. He even proposed that the system utilize 88 different frequencies--the number of keys on a piano. Finally, he had found a use for his “See Note” system!

            For several months they discussed their invention. In one version Antheil himself decided they should patent it. In another Charles Kettering, the director of General Motor’s research division, who then headed the Inventor’s Council, made the suggestion. Then, with the help of a professor Mackowen of electrical engineering at Caltech, Antheil ironed out the bugs, and on June 10, 1941, Hedy Markey (by then she was on husband number two) and George Antheil filed a patent application. A year later, on August 11, 1942, the two inventors received US patent number 2, 292,387 for a “secret communication system.”      

            Never one to miss out an opportunity for self-promotion, Antheil spent considerable effort lobbying the Navy to adopt their invention, but the Navy turned it down on the grounds that it would be too bulky. Evidently, they thought Antheil wanted to put a player piano in a torpedo.

            Thus, the Lamarr-Antheil guidance system was shelved and failed to alter the course of the war. Antheil died in obscurity of a heart attack in 1959 and never saw the fruits of his labors. Lamarr’s screen career faded rapidly, she ran through six husbands and several fortunes all together, and was arrested twice on shoplifting charges. (Despite strenuous denials in her autobiography, acquaintances confirm she was a kleptomaniac.) Without work, she embarked on her habit of suing virtually anyone who mentioned her in public. In 1998, she took action against the Canadian software firm Corel, which, thinking she was dead, had used her likeness on the box for their CorelDraw8. She sought $15 million in damages; they settled for less and made her a consultant. Hedy Lamarr died in Florida, finally well off but something of a recluse, on January 19, 2000. A suit against Gallo winery was in litigation.

            Despite the bittersweet fate of the protagonists, the tale of frequency hopping has a happy ending. Ten years after Navy brass dismissed Antheil as a nutcase, electronics had improved to the point of being able to implement frequency hopping, and the Lamarr-Antheil patent became the basis for all secret military communications. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis the armed forces were routinely using frequency hopping to scramble signals.

            That is not all. Frequency hopping, today known as spread spectrum technology because it spreads the signal over a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum rather than confining it to a narrow band, has other advantages. It is difficult to jam spread-spectrum broadcasts because even the most intense jamming signal on one frequency will interfere with only a tiny portion of the full transmission. Furthermore, if the transmitted signal is hopping all over the place, most of the frequencies at any instant of time are left unused. Thus, spread spectrum is ideal for interleaving (multiplexing) many messages simultaneously, and so it becomes a more efficient transmitting method than ordinary single-frequency techniques. For those reasons, spread-spectrum is now becoming the basis of internet and cell-phone traffic. And at the bottom of it all, lie some crazy ideas about relativity theory, player pianos, endocrine glands, and movie star who enjoyed designing weapons.

 

            Such a fabulously improbable yarn could be little else than true. And it is--as far as it goes. The patent exists and is readily available on the internet. Thousands of tributes to Hedy Lamarr may also be found there. She and Antheil (posthumously) received a special Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997. When told of the award, she replied, “It’s about time.” Tabloids proclaimed her the genius behind the internet.

            The urban legend is by now immutable, but as usual with such a tale--even such a great one—there is more than meets the eye. It’s not entirely clear how much Hedy understood about her invention. In a somewhat tongue-and-cheek interview published in the armed forces newspaper The Stars and Stripes, Hedy declares that Antheil “did the really important chemical part.” It was fun to watch “them” (Antheil and Mackowen?) “put together all the little thingamabobs that went into the device.” Lamarr never mentions the invention, or Antheil, in her autobiography, which admittedly is more concerned with her sexual adventures. She did, however, disclose to the Stars and Stripes that “it was lots more fun being scientific than going to the movies.”

            Hans-Joachim Braun, author of the American Heritage article, has also informed me that he has found a document in the Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv in Frieburg proving the subject of frequency shifting was discussed in July 1939 at the German firm of Siemens and Halske; Braun assumes that it probably came up at Mandl’s firm several years earlier. One can’t dismiss the possibility that Hedy was merely passing on the contents of a planning session that she had overheard. Robert Price, a retired MIT engineer and an authority on the history of secret communications, at one time interviewed Lamarr. Mandl, he reports, was a Jew, a Jew selling arms to Hitler. Most of Lamarr’s circle were Nazi sympathizers, but she had become vehemently anti-Nazi. Price feels certain that she was basically acting as a spy--”the Mata Hari of World War II”--stealing the secrets of her husband’s firm and conveying them to the West.

            On the other hand, Antheil always gave her the greater part of the credit, and in a letter to a Mr. Reynolds, apparently the Director of the National Inventor's Council, he says:

 

                        Likewise, a curiosity of this idea is that is co-inventor is Miss Hedy Lamarr, the motion picture actress (who is a good friend of mine), who, curiously enough, has had considerable experience of a second-hand nature concerning this subject. Her first husband, Fritz Mendel [sic], was once on of the largest munition [sic] manufacturers in Austria, besides which Miss Lamarr has a natural aptitude for the rather unfeminine occupation of inventor.

 

            Is Antheil implying that the idea originated with her or her husband? Hmm. The letter actually concerned another invention on which the two were collaborating: a “magnetic anti-aircraft shell,” which was supposed to detect the proximity of an enemy airplane by a “magnetic device” and cause the shell to explode on target. The workings of this “magnetic device,” however are simply not explained, leading one to wonder whether the inventors knew what they were talking about. Antheil does offer to send a more elaborate description and requests a prompt response for an unusual reason:

 

                        Inasmuch as I am very happily—and very suitably married—and also inasmuch as no young married wife can long endure the story that Miss Hedy Lamarr and myself are working upon an anti-aircraft shell together (which is the story which Miss Lamarr—truthfully—tells my wife!) some degree of haste is required if this family, which include a three and one half year old son, is to be kept together!

 

            It does not appear that the magnetic anti-aircraft shell got very far; judging from a 1941 letter of Antheil to Lamarr, he gave up the project when Hedy became suspicious that he was trying to defraud her. Perhaps she threatened to sue.

 

            So who did what? We don’t know. We do know, however, that the concept of frequency hopping has had a long history. David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, writes in his article “Cryptology and the Origins of Spread Spectrum,” that in 1929 a Polish engineer Leonard Danilewicz, proposed to the Polish army a system for secret radio telegraphy, which he later mourned “unfortunately did not win acceptance, as it was a truly barbaric idea consisting of constant changes of transmitter frequency.” In the 1930s a Swiss inventor, Gustav Guanella, proposed a similar idea and in 1935 two Telefunken engineers Paul Kotowski and Kurt Dannehl applied for a patent for a device to hide voice signals under a “broadband noiselike signal produced by a rotating generator.”

            During World War II spread spectrum devices were already in action, on both sides. They were used mostly in radar, where synchronization of the transmitter and receiver is not a problem (because transmitter and receiver are at the same location). The most famous use of frequency hopping during the war was the ultrasecret SIGSALY* system, which in 1944 scrambled the telephone conversations between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It was the first absolutely unbreakable scrambling system. SIGSALY’s workings were far too complex to describe in detail here. Roughly speaking, SIGSALY first sampled the amplitude level (loudness) of Churchill and Roosevelt’s voices and “quantized” them. Today we would say the system effectively digitized the voices. It next added a randomly generated number to each sample, scrambling the voice levels. The now random intensities were broadcast across the Atlantic by FM radio, which converts every amplitude level to a different frequency. Because all this took place in a totally unpredictable fashion the message was impossible to crack.

            How were the random numbers generated? Mercury vapor lamps produce perfectly random “white noise,” or static. Most engineers try to suppress noise; the SIGSALY designers used it. Fifty times a second, they sampled the noise levels and recorded them onto vinyl disks, essentially record masters. Vinyl, then, encoded the random digits later added to the voice signals. The disks played the same role as Antheil’s player-piano rolls; one was sent to Washington and another to London under high security. Synchronization between the Washington and London disks was accomplished by a quartz-crystal oscillator, much like those found in Swiss watches today, except that these were housed in seven-foot tall ovens shaped like horseshoes. The disks were destroyed after a single usage. SIGSALY, one must acknowledge, was a bit more sophisticated than player-piano rolls. The SIGSALY designers in fact implemented no fewer than eight major innovations in electronic communication. Price considers it the greatest technological achievement of WWII, after the atomic bomb and radar. Much more about SIGSALY can be found on the NSA’s website.

            Following the war, spread spectrum continued to be developed at MIT, and by 1947 engineers at Sylvania were using spread spectrum to guide missiles. At about the same time, Mortimer Rogoff, at the Federal Telecommunication Laboratories in Nutley, N.J., used the Manhattan telephone directory to generate a pseudorandom key. By 1955, spread spectrum was overcoming jamming.

           

            This, more plausibly, is the true evolutionary trunk of spread-spectrum technology. The fact is, secret communication was invented in secret, and that a movie star has become enshrined as its originator is a bit of only-in-America irony. Price, who worked at MIT on secret communications systems in the 1950s--with no knowledge of Lamarr and Antheil--also points out that civilian communications systems use a variation of spread spectrum known as Code Division Multiple Access. When International Telephone and Telegraph went to patent CDMA in the mid 1950s, ITT’s researchers discovered the Lamarr-Antheil patent as dead prior art, but duly cited it (and Hedy demanded royalties). This, in the technical world at least, was the resurrection of the Lamarr-Antheil invention. One can readily agree with David Kahn, who concludes, “Though only a sidelight in the history of spread spectrum, because it had no direct influence on the evolution of the technology, the frequency-hopping invention did impart to that field its most glittering bit of glamour.”

            That peroration may be a bit of a letdown but, there are several lessons to be learned from the tale of Hedy and George, most of them cheerful. Scientists too often sneer at attempts by artists to find meaning in the great theories of nature. How is it possible to translate special relativity into music? Perhaps it isn’t, but in the twentieth-century artists’ attempts to interpret the fourth dimension, we have a beautiful example of a situation in which these naive efforts profoundly influenced the entire course of modern art. In the case of one brash young composer, his misunderstandings about spacetime led in part to a significant invention. If these naive artists had, as many scientists wish, decided that science lay forever outside their province, civilization would have been, and would be, impoverished. One lesson of the Lamarr-Antheil tale should be to inculcate a greater live-and-let-live attitude towards amateurs. They may not always get it right, but sometimes to get it wrong is better.

            Scientists should foster a more indulgent attitude toward mavericks but the reverse also applies. The general public romanticizes the maverick at the expense of the less glamorous trench soldier. In the iconification of the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of all secret communication we see the same adoration of the outsider as was bestowed on Buckminster Fuller. To this day virtually everyone believes Fuller invented the geodesic dome, but as I have mentioned in the introduction to the Technology Domain, it is a matter of record that a more conventional engineer did it thirty years earlier.

            What is forgotten in all this, as usual, is the Panopticon’s dusty exhibit on progress as perspiration. As we have seen throughout, scientific and technological progress tends to be incremental. Movie stars may have brilliant ideas, but it takes the labor of an unknown composer to bring it to fruition. Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, once remarked to me that he could explain the idea behind his celebrated proof to another specialist in three or four minutes. But it took Wiles eight years to work out the consequences. He also confessed to me that he “tried everything,” like the legendary monkeys who type out War and Peace by trial and error. At the same time, he was quite aware that “the person who carries the torch past the finish line gets all the credit.” A prophetic remark.

            Before the finish, there is inspiration, trial and error, incremental progress and misunderstandings. All are required to carry the race forward and all should be respected.

           

References and notes for Chapter XVI

            There is no reference that covers the “intellectual” genesis of the Lamarr-Antheil Patent. For Antheil’s brief description of the adventure, see his autobiography Bad Boy of Music, originally published in 1945. (Samuel French edition: New York, 1990), especially chapter 32.

            Hedy Lamarr’s exploits may be found in her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me (Fawcett: 1966).

            For more about the influence of the fourth-dimension on twentieth-century art, see Linda Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1983), p. 328, which is a comprehensive treatment of this fascinating subject.

pp. 1-2: Antheil’s description of his meeting with Hedy Lamarr can be found in Bad Boy , chapter 32.

pp. 3-4: More about Pound’s opera can be found in Humphrey Carpenters’ A Serious Character, The Life of Ezra Pound (Delta: New York, 1988).

pp. 4-5: The quotes about music and machines are from Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Da Capo Press: NY, 1968). See especially pp. 50-58.

          The excerpt from Antheil’s manifesto in De Stijl can be found in Henderson, p. 328. Henderson also discusses the Scientific American contest. The first-prize essay was published in Scientific American, 3 July (1909), p. 6,15.. All the winning essays are still available in Henry Parker Manning, ed., The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained: A Collection of Essays Selected from Those Submitted in the Scientific American’s Prize Competition (Munn & Co.: New York, 1910).

pp. 8-10”: Antheil’s “See Note” system was showcased in “How to Play Two-Handed Piano,” Esquire magazine ( January, 1938, p. 52) and“6 Sharps That Beat in 3/4 Time,” Esquire magazine (March, 1938, p. 106).

         Antheil’s novel under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop is Death in the Dark (Faber and Faber: London, publication date not given, but approximately 1930). It is now unavailable except on microfilm from the University of California, Los Angeles.

         Antheil’s handbook on hormonal criminology is Every Man His Own Detective, A Study of Glandular Criminology (Stackpole: NY, 1937).

         Antheil’s Esquire articles on endocrinology are “Glands on a Hobby Horse” (April, 1936, p. 47); “Handbook for the Questing Male” (May, 1936, p. 40); “The Glandbook in Practical Use” (June, 1936, p. 36).

pp. 10 -12: The information on Mandl, as well Antheil’s dealings with the Navy, is from Hans-Joachim Braun, “Advanced Weaponry of the Stars,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology , Spring, 1997, p. 10.

pp. 15-16: The Stars and Stripes interview was in the Monday, Nov. 19, 1945 edition, reprinted in Antheil’s Bad Boy of Music.

         The author is grateful for Hans-Joachim Braun’s information on the document he found in the Bundesarchi/Militärarchive. It is apparently no longer available to him.

         The letters from Antheil to Reynolds and Lamarr are in the Antheil Collection at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. My thanks to Mauro Piccinini of Trieste, Italy for making them available to me.

         The history of SIGSALY and spread-spectrum technology is based on David Kahn’s “Cryptology and the origins of spread spectrum,” IEEE Spectrum, September, 1984, pp. 70-80, and on the articles on the NSA website, www.nsa.gov.

         I wish to thank Robert Price for his extensive information on the history of secret communications.