Formal German development of glide bombs began in 1938 with the opening of a research program at the German Aviation Research Institute, but discussions of such technology had been ongoing in the German engineering community during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when the Luftwaffe, which participated in that war on the side of the Spanish Fascists, struggled with the problem of bombing ships that were maneuvering to evade its aircraft. (It was the Luftwaffe’s notorious Condor Legion that bombed the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, the subject of Picasso’s famous painting.) And significantly for Hedy’s possible knowledge of early glide-bomb research, one of the first bombs that Germany developed, the Henschel Hs 293, used a Walter hydrogen-peroxide rocket to increase its forward motion enough to prevent it from being overtaken by its control plane, a serious problem with earlier unpowered models. (When the German glide bombs were deployed operationally, midway through World War II, they caused great destruction. Their threat was finally abated by bombing the limited number of airfields specially equipped to launch them.)
None of these unrelated developments adds up to Hedy’s invention, but they do suggest what some of the possible components and extrapolations might be that prepared her for her breakthrough. Nino Amarena, the inventor and engineer, commented on the phenomenon in our discussion of his 1997 interview with Hedy. “More often than not,” he told me, “the inventive process follows a cascade of ideas and thoughts interconnected from previous concepts that for the most part lie separate, unconnected and unrelated. It takes a clear state of mind, which is usually someone thinking ‘outside the box,’ to suddenly or serendipitously see the connection between the unrelated concepts and put it all together to create something new.” In that regard, the process of invention is no different from the creative process in other fields. Scientific discovery proceeds the same way. So do painting and sculpture. So does creative writing. The results are different, because each process operates on different realities and by different rules.
Hedy’s original idea is simple to state: if a radio transmitter and receiver are synchronized to change their tuning simultaneously, hopping together randomly from frequency to frequency, then the radio signal passing between them cannot be jammed. Hedy called this idea “hopping of frequencies,” a grammatically German translation of the German compound word Frequenzsprungverfahren, “frequency-hopping process”—in colloquial English, “frequency hopping.”
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.