Reduction to practice once meant meeting the U.S. Patent Office requirement that the claimant provide a miniature working model of the invention to demonstrate its operation. The Patent Office dropped that requirement in 1880, allowing instead for what it called “constructive” reduction to practice, meaning “construed” or, as we would say today, “virtual” demonstration—drawings and a written description instead of a physical model. But the model or the drawings and description could be, and usually are, only one example of how the invention might be embodied in a working machine. There might be “cogwheels and levers and other mechanical elements” in the machine the inventor draws or builds to demonstrate how his invention would work in practice; but unless the patent is poorly drafted, the machine designed to demonstrate the new idea would not necessarily be the only way the invention might be embodied. The distinction is important. Hedy and George would come into conflict with the service to which they would offer their invention—the U.S. Navy—because the naval officers with whom they dealt failed to understand the distinction between their broad patent and the machinery they devised on paper to demonstrate how it would work.
Hedy had the idea of frequency hopping. She needed George Antheil to help her reduce it to practice. According to him, writing in his draft memoir, she chose him because he had some familiarity with munitions—a certificate preserved among his papers in the Library of Congress shows that Antheil worked for an unspecified period of time as a certified inspector of artillery ammunition at the U.S. armory in Tullytown, Pennsylvania, beginning on 12 August 1918.
It seems that Hedy had discovered that somewhere along the line of my perhaps not too nefarious but certainly varied past I have at one time been a government inspector of U.S. munitions. Albeit my knowledge of the same was at this particular moment a bit dusty, nevertheless I was undoubtedly the only “munition brains” available at that time, and Hedy had decided that I would have to do. Hedy, it seemed, had invented a marvelous kind of new munition which she wanted to perfect with me and offer to the U.S.A. government.
If so, then her choice was fortuitous, because Antheil was also, and more significantly, something of an expert on making machines talk to each other in synchrony. He had tried and failed to synchronize sixteen player pianos in the early performances of his Ballet mécanique. He had succeeded in synchronizing four player pianos at his Carnegie Hall concert in 1927. In the fall of 1940, he and Hedy now proceeded to work together to apply that knowledge to the problem of creating a frequency-hopping radio signal and synchronizing its frequency changes between a ship or an airplane and a torpedo.
[EIGHT]
Flashes of Genius
Hedy’s divorce from Gene Markey became final in October 1940, just as George and Boski Antheil were moving into a rental house at 1246 North Sweetzer Avenue, on the flats below the Hollywood Hills. “We are, at this instant, engaged in hanging up some of our pictures,” George wrote to William Bullitt on 16 October, “a Leger, several Picassos, several Kubins, a Braque, several Marcoussis, etc. And we have just added several new pieces of furniture made for us by Adrian, the Hollywood designer. Both Boski and Hedy send their best to you. Hedy is a quite nice, but mad, girl who besides being very beautiful indeed spends most of her spare time inventing things—she’s just invented a new ‘soda pop’ which she’s patenting—of all things!” The “soda pop” was the cola “bouillon cube” that Howard Hughes was helping Hedy develop that eventually flopped. One price of George’s failed SEE-Note project had been selling two of his paintings in a poor market depressed by the war and the crowd of refugees from Europe who were selling their artworks as well.
Hedy and George worked together on their invention in the evenings through the fall and early winter of 1940, embodying Hedy’s original idea of frequency hopping in an appropriate mechanism—in patent language, reducing it to practice.
The basic problem of transmitting a frequency-hopping command signal between a ship or an airplane and a torpedo was that of synchronizing the transmitter and the receiver so that they could hop together from frequency to frequency. In the first version of their invention, the one they would offer in outline to the National Inventors Council in December 1940, they described a system that relied on human operators to coordinate the signaling, which the ship launching the torpedo would control.
First the ship would determine the maximum time its torpedo would need to travel from ship to target. Next it would add on a certain additional amount of time to allow for currents and torpedo and target maneuvers. Next the ship would contact the observer plane, and the two would verify the time total and agree on it. They would also agree on the intervals of time into which the ship-to-torpedo communications would be broken down, intervals when both plane and ship would observe radio silence. During those intervals, the torpedo would be running on its own on whatever course had been set for it.
Between those intervals of radio silence, however, in brief, “split-second” communications, “the plane overhead will flash directional corrections and the launching ship will immediately thereafter flash the correctional radio pattern over its proper wavelength for that particular interval.” Bundled into this sentence is the idea of changing frequencies each time another signal is sent to the torpedo—the crucial phrase is “over its proper wavelength for that particular interval”—but the two inventors fail to, or choose not to, specify a mechanism for changing the “wavelength”—the frequency—of the signal. They may have decided not to make their mechanism public, whatever it might be, until they had patented it. Or, more probably, they had simply not yet worked out what the mechanism would be.
The latter possibility seems more likely given the afterthought of the phrase. The archaeology of the creative process reveals itself in these layers, beginning with the first. Idea One: radio control of a torpedo to increase its chances of hitting its target, something U.S. torpedoes did not yet have. Idea Two: “split-second” radio signals between plane, ship, and torpedo in quick bursts between intervals of radio silence. Idea Three: changing the frequency of those split-second signals by some undetermined mechanism, adding another layer of complexity that a would-be jammer would have to puzzle through. The Lamarr-Antheil radio-controlled torpedo had reached this point in its evolution when the two inventors offered their ideas to the U.S. government in December 1940.