As late as 1945, George still had to reassure his wife about his behavior when they were apart, writing to her:
By the way, don’t take my letters to the “girl friends” seriously. It hardly ever does occur to me—but once in a long while the darkness still momentarily descends, and in a flash of white anger I sometimes still do whip out—but more and more harmlessly. I know you’ll understand what I mean.
Here is the fact: I’ve been away for a month, and I haven’t even taken a girl out to dinner, let alone anything else. This for me is a record. Especially with everybody in the world at hand. I promise to stay true.
“Whip out,” in the context of Antheil’s anger, seems to mean “lash out.” What darkness was he speaking of? He didn’t say, but certainly his struggles for recognition, even sometimes for bare existence, could have been enough to set a small, proud man hunting for sexual conquests.
By 30 September Boski had returned to find George and Hedy working on their invention. George wrote to Bullitt that day, shamelessly name-dropping without explaining why he and Hedy were spending time together, and included her autographed photo. “I get around Hollywood a great deal, because, often, I must,” Antheil told his influential friend obscurely, “and the other night when I was having dinner with the ultra-beautiful Hedy Lamarr… she expressed such fervent admiration for you that—for the jest of the thing for I know it’ll make you smile—I made her go to her cabinet, get out her most gorgeous photograph, and sign that admiration upon it. It may amuse you, inasmuch as I notice that TIME Magazine of this week declares that Hedy Lamarr is the American soldier’s favorite, Ann Sheridan coming second.”
How did an actress and a composer go about inventing a remote-controlled torpedo? What was original about their invention that allowed them to successfully patent it, as they eventually did? Hedy discussed the invention process at length in 1997 in a telephone conversation with a fellow inventor, Carmelo “Nino” Amarena, who is also an electrical engineer expert in the field of digital wireless communications. “We talked like two engineers on a hot project,” Amarena told me, “prompting one another to the next subject. I never felt I was talking to a movie star, but to a fellow inventor. When you talk to a sympathetic mind about technology, gender, age, and experience disappear completely, and soon you’re one-on-one with the topic at hand.” Hedy told Amarena that she thought first of a torpedo that was remote controlled. For that she thought of radio.
Amarena wasn’t sure why she thought of radio when the Mandl dinner table discussions had concerned wire guidance, but there is reference in the working patent documents that Hedy’s son Anthony provided to me to a particular 1939 Philco console-model radio with a unique new feature: the retail radio market’s first wireless remote control, a six-inch cabinetry cube with a dialer on top with ten finger holes, like the dialer on a dial telephone. The holes matched up with a ring of small indentations impressed into the surface of the cube printed with the call letters of the radio stations set up to be dialed. Inserting a finger into the dialer hole corresponding to the station to be dialed, rotating the dialer, and letting it return signaled the radio to change frequency to that of the desired station. There were dial positions for up to eight radio stations, plus a dial position for volume control and another that would turn the radio off. (It had to be turned on by hand.) Philco called its new remote the Mystery Control. It was essentially a one-tube radio that communicated on a fixed frequency with either one of two models of console radios, the less expensive 39-55RX or the more elaborate 39-116RX. Each had a corresponding fixed-frequency accessory receiver inside its cabinet that processed the signals from the remote.
With reference in their working documents to the Philco Mystery Control, Hedy or George must at least have seen the radio somewhere. The 116RX was Philco’s top-of-the-line model, with a ten-tube radio and expensive cabinetry; it cost $162.50, which would be about $2,600 today, and only 20,480 were manufactured. It was too expensive for the Antheils. Hedy may have bought one or received one as a gift in 1939, the first year of its manufacture. With a Mystery Control in hand, changing stations on her Philco radio from across the room, she could easily have conceived the idea of using radio to control a torpedo, changing its direction remotely just as she changed radio stations.
But conceiving a new use for an existing invention that is substantially the same as the old is not usually a patentable idea. Nor did Hedy think it so. She took her idea a step further, not to make it patentable merely, but to solve a problem she foresaw of torpedo control by radio: jamming. How she knew that set-frequency radio-control systems were easily jammed, she never said. The Philco radios that used Mystery Control were plagued with interference problems, and jamming is simply deliberate interference. The radios had to be adjusted in apartment buildings and other close quarters to prevent signals sent in one apartment from changing stations on radios in other apartments, much as early fixed-frequency garage-door remote controls sometimes signaled neighbors’ garage doors to open that happened to be tuned to the same frequency.
Another possible model for Hedy’s thinking was German research ongoing in the 1930s on radio-controlled anti-ship weapons such as glide bombs, research about which she might have heard over the Mandl dinner table. Radio control had already been pioneered before and during World War I. The Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla patented a radio-controlled boat, which could of course be loaded with explosives and serve as a torpedo, in 1898; a text on the subject, Radiodynamics: The Wireless Control of Torpedoes and Other Mechanisms, by a U.S. Navy engineer, B. F. Miessner, was published in the United States in 1916.
Miessner examines the problem of jamming but offers no solution comparable to the one Hedy would eventually conceive. The closest he comes is a system that generates high-frequency signals so far above the contemporary range of signaling frequencies that an enemy would be unlikely to detect it, much less jam it. The system had a serious flaw: had it been developed, it would eventually have started a minor arms race, with each side moving to higher frequencies as previous operating frequencies were overrun. Success would depend, that is, on an enemy’s temporary ignorance of a frequency selection rather than on an active mechanism that somehow blocked or evaded a jamming attempt.
A glide bomb, as its name implies, is a winged bomb dropped from a plane that can be guided by radio control of its wing surfaces to glide forward and change direction as it falls, maneuvering toward a target even if the target attempts to move itself out of the way. The Japanese kamikaze suicide planes that plagued U.S. Navy ships late in World War II were essentially powered glide bombs, except that the glide bombs developed in Germany were remote controlled so that no human pilot had to be sacrificed to their operation.