It was not their only offering. Hedy and George worked on at least two other inventions during this period besides their torpedo. “In the meantime,” Antheil wrote early in 1941, “Hedy’s finished off no less than three ‘secret weapon’ gadgets and sent them off to the National Inventors Council… and [we] have in due time received our serial numbers pending the War Department’s complete investigation.” The change in the wording of this sentence from singular—“Hedy’s”—to plural—the implied but missing “we” and “our serial numbers”—indicates that George as well as Hedy was involved in these other efforts.
One of them, the only one for which information survives, was an anti-aircraft shell fitted with a proximity fuse. Hitting a moving target such as an enemy bomber high in the air was an extremely difficult challenge for ground-based anti-aircraft crews. Thousands of shells had to be fired to swarm the area around and ahead of an attacking plane, and even with such a prodigal expenditure of munitions the chances of a clean hit were small. The American development of a radar proximity fuse at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, delivered to the military in 1943, was an achievement of even greater wartime importance than the development of the first atomic bombs. A proximity fuse detects a target and detonates an explosive shell at a predetermined distance away, turning a near miss into a hit. Accurate aiming is still a challenge, but far more enemy aircraft were shot down during World War II using radar proximity shells than conventional munitions. Such proximity shells saved thousands of American sailors from Japanese kamikaze attacks in the last year of the war.
Germany was working on a proximity fuse in the 1930s, raising the possibility that Hedy could have heard about such a device during her Mandl years. In November 1939, information on German secret weapons, including the proximity fuse, was passed to British intelligence by an anti-Nazi German physicist, Hans Ferdinand Mayer, in the famous Oslo Report he wrote out in an Oslo hotel room and sent to the local British embassy. The proximity fuse Mayer described in his report worked not by radar, which was still in a primitive stage of development, but by using the electrical phenomenon known as capacitance to sense the presence of a large conductive body such as an airplane. The fuse as designed was not successful; the German program was frozen in 1940 to give priority to other research and ultimately abandoned.
Germany did develop naval magnetic mines during the war, however, and like the German mines, Hedy and George’s proximity shell generated a magnetic field to sense the presence of a large metal body such as an airplane. George undertook to handle submitting the idea to the National Inventors Council in early November 1940, which led to a dispute in January 1941 between him and Hedy that threatened their partnership.
At some point in the fall of 1940 they had introduced Louis Eshman, the doctor who had bandaged George’s finger when he cut it with a razor blade sharpening pencils, into their inventors’ group as a witness. Witnessing to the stages of development of an invention as they occur is important to establishing priority. (Eshman may have been Hedy’s doctor and on loan, as it were, to Antheil when he wounded himself. Certainly the physician’s loyalties were to her, not to Antheil.) Having joined the group, Eshman soon began to suspect Antheil of withholding information about Washington’s response to the magnetic proximity shell proposal, something a person might do who meant to cut his partners out of a claim. When Hedy accused Antheil of such dereliction, he was understandably incensed.
In the beginning, the composer reminded Hedy in a letter he wrote to her on 10 January 1941, they had agreed to an equal partnership. He had not questioned the arrangement until lately, and he wasn’t doing so now entirely because of her. They had agreed that he “was to handle entirely the matter of the anti-aircraft shell.” He did handle it as well as he knew how, he wrote. “It has not been my fault that (a) it has not developed as I hoped, and (b) that they in Washington have not sent you personal notice of it.” But “both you and Louis have made me feel, time and time again, as if it were somehow my fault that both (a) and (b) above did not materialize.”
Upset by this distrust, Antheil continued, “I found it necessary for my peace of mind to come to explain to you and Louis that it was not possible to secure an invention’s patent on these items, and to explain and justify my every step to date.” In the beginning, he added, it had not been necessary to justify his actions. “You trusted me in the beginning,” he told Hedy. “After awhile, and for some reason I shall not care to guess here, you do not trust me.”
The previous evening, 9 January, he had gone to Hedy’s house “just for amusement’s sake” to “show you both how unjust you have been with me.” What he did to show them is unrecorded, but whatever it was, Hedy responded badly. “I am terribly sorry,” he wrote, “that you have taken it this way because, as you know fully well, I am terribly fond of you, and if things had only remained as they were in the beginning, I would have gotten much further along in all this business, long ago, probably.” Which would at least seem to confirm that George and Hedy did not have an affair. Given George’s history, Hedy may even have introduced Lou Eshman as a chaperone.
Antheil would inform Bullitt later that year that Hedy “is a queer girl [who] believes that spies and saboteurs are on every hand, and cannot understand why President Roosevelt does not immediately put them all under arrest. ‘That is what we’d do in Europe’ she insists, excitedly. I then have to patiently tell her that this is America, glorious Democracy, the ways of which are not always clear to the apprehensive European mind.”
In the midst of their contretemps, on 23 December 1940, George and Hedy offered up their most important invention, which they identified at this early stage as “Idea for a Radio-Controlled Torpedo.” The two “made blueprints, directions, explanations,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt, “and sent them off to the National Inventors Council. They immediately showed interest in the project and asked for further explanation, which was duly sent.”
The idea Hedy and George offered in this first iteration was not yet the Secret Communication System of their later patent, but the fundamental conception was in place. A ship would launch a torpedo, a plane would observe its trajectory; at regular intervals the plane would signal torpedo course corrections to the ship, and the ship would flash them to the torpedo. Between these isolated, brief signals, each sent on a different frequency, there would be radio silence among the three components of the system. So frequency hopping was included, but the hops were produced manually at intervals not of fractions of a second but of a minute or more. Not yet in place was the semiautomatic system using a modified player-piano roll that Antheil would contribute in the months ahead. But the two inventors’ submission offered a beginning, and the first hint of what was to come. It was enough, evidently, to claim the interest of the council leaders.
Like Hedy and George’s effort to invent a superior torpedo, the National Inventors Council had its beginnings in the torpedoing of a crowded passenger ship without warning by a German submarine. In the case of the National Inventors Council the ship was the Cunard liner Lusitania, torpedoed on 7 May 1915 as it was crossing from New York to Liverpool, with a loss of 1,134 lives, including more than 100 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson protested the sinking to the German Empire in the strongest terms; newspapers filled with stories of America’s lack of preparation for a war made brutal by dark new inventions.
Early in July 1915, Thomas Edison expressed his opinion in a New York Times interview of what the government should do to foster invention in anticipation of joining the war. The secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, a North Carolina lawyer and newspaper editor whose father had been a shipbuilder, read the interview and decided to enlist Edison’s help in meeting the challenge. On 7 July he wrote the famous inventor a letter. After a long paragraph of flattery, it got to the point: