CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)
By:
October 5, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL
When they first met in 1940, Hedy Lamarr was a film star billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world” and George Antheil was a concert pianist best known for his Ballet Méchanique, a surrealist composition scored for sixteen player pianos, three xylophones, three airplane propellers, and other noise-making devices. His hobby? Endocrinology. According to his entertaining but unreliable memoir, Bad Boy of Music (1945), Lamarr summoned him to a meeting at the home of mutual friends to ask him if gland extracts could be used to make her breasts larger. He said yes, she wrote her unlisted phone number on his windshield in lipstick, and the following evening they met at her place for dinner. What ignited then was not a romance, but the genesis of their shared patent for a “Secret Communications System,” granted on August 11, 1942, that decades later evolved into the spread spectrum technology at the root of modern wireless communications.
Antheil wrote that Lamarr said “she knew a good deal about new munitions and secret weapons, some of which she invented herself.” He thought that her idea for “a radio-directed torpedo” was so good that he “suggested she patent it and give it to the United States Government.”
Lamarr later told her son that she and Antheil had been seated at the piano, where “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.’”
Lamarr’s invention came to be known as “frequency hopping,” by which quickly changing radio frequencies between a transmitter (say, a submarine) and a receiver (a torpedo) kept a third party from intercepting or jamming the signal, thus allowing the torpedo to proceed unimpeded to its target. Antheil brought Lamarr’s idea to life via his knowledge of synchronization, honed by his work with player pianos. Their patent utilized perforated paper rolls and eighty-eight frequencies—the number of keys on a piano. A professor of electrical engineering from Cal Tech also “helped them iron out the bugs.” Communications expert David Hughes told the New York Times in 2004 that the patent was “the damnedest Rube Goldberg [device] you ever saw” though “the seminal idea was there.”
Lamarr didn’t mention Antheil or their patent in the pages of her entertaining but unreliable memoir, Ecstasy and Me (1967). Antheil was dead by then, having gone to his grave in 1959, likely believing that their collaboration had been for naught. “Let’s face it,” he told a reporter in 1945. “By the time the patent came through somebody else thought up a better torpedo.” 1959 was also the year their patent expired.
Of course, neither of them could have foreseen frequency hopping’s extraordinary afterlife, made possible first by transistor technology and then by microchips subbing for Antheil’s paper rolls, or that its ultimate utility was not as a method to guide torpedoes but as the basis of secure wireless communications. Cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, all utilize some form of spread spectrum technology, which would not exist without ideas presented in the Lamarr-Antheil patent. In 1997, three years before Lamarr’s death, she and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for “blazing new trails on the electronic frontier.” “It’s about time,” she noted.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | TBD on TBD | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!