One of the imperative needs of the Navy, in my judgment, is machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive genius of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare as shown abroad, and it is my intention, if a practical way can be worked out, as I think it can be, to establish, at the earliest moment, a department of invention and development, to which all ideas and suggestions, either from the service or from civilian inventors, can be referred for determination as to whether they contain practical suggestions for us to take up and perfect….
There is no particular place, or particular body of men, relieved of all other work, charged solely with the duty of either devising new things themselves or perfecting crude ideas that are submitted to the department by our naturally inventive people.
The result of Daniels’s effort was the Naval Consulting Board, organized in October 1915 with a large representation of inventors, engineers, and industrialists, a few mathematicians, and no scientists, a profession the self-educated Edison resented and preferred to avoid. After ragging the Navy about its “mentally inbred” officers, the Wizard of Menlo Park agreed to become the board’s president. By the end of the war the board had reviewed more than 110,000 ideas and inventions, most of them submitted by ordinary Americans. Only about 110 passed the first two levels of preliminary examiners to be submitted to technical committees, and of those only one actually went into production, an instrument for testing pilots for airsickness. “Several others were developed,” the board’s historian writes defensively, “and might have later been used.”
Despite this dismal performance by “our naturally inventive people,” the Naval Consulting Board served as a model for the National Inventors Council that was organized by Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s close adviser, in the summer of 1940. Hopkins had been prodded to do so by a remarkable patent agent and theatrical producer named Lawrence Langner. Born in Wales in 1890, Langner trained as an engineer before becoming a patent agent for a London firm in New York in 1910. He left the firm in 1912 to represent the inventor and electrical engineer Charles F. Kettering. Kettering had just patented the first electric starter system for Cadillac; Langner represented him in securing patent protection in Europe. Success with that opportunity led Langner to set up in business in New York as a patent and trademark agent specializing in securing foreign protection for American clients.
The Welsh engineer was also interested in theater. He was one of the founders of the Washington Square Players, an ambitious amateur group that opened its doors in 1915; in 1919, as an outgrowth of the Players, he co-founded the Theatre Guild. Later in life, besides producing plays and musicals, Langner would co-found the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and the Westport Country Playhouse, all while continuing work as a successful patent and trademark agent.
In the summer of 1940, Langner had discussed the problem inventors faced in dealing with the U.S. government with an engineering colleague, Thomas Midgley, the co-inventor with Kettering of leaded gasoline. (As a high-school baseball player in Ohio, Midgley had identified the diluted sap of the slippery elm as the best substance for pitching fast-curving spitballs; many professional pitchers took it up. Besides leaded gasoline he was the inventor of Freon, the refrigerant that contributed greatly to the creation of the ozone hole. An environmental historian would describe Midgley as having “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”) “Inventors often lost a great deal of time in trying to interest the Government in their ideas and inventions,” a science journal summarizes Langner and Midgley’s discussion, “because they did not know which agency would make use of them, and as a result often sent them to the wrong place. Of all the places chosen by inventors to send their brain-children the one most often selected was the office of the President of the United States, where there is no agency for dealing with them.”
Kettering, like Edison before him a prolific inventor, agreed to chair the board of the new organization that Harry Hopkins assembled; Langner became board secretary, Midgley a board member. Thus positioned to respond to George and Hedy’s invention were three men ideally prepared to see its virtues. Like Hedy, Langner was experienced with theater and an inventor himself as well as a patent agent. Midgley and Kettering, working with Elmer Sperry and a group of other engineers, had developed a remote-controlled, gyroscopically stabilized “flying bomb” during World War I that had reached the stage of field trials when the armistice ended the war in November 1918.
By mid-May 1941, Antheil could report to Bullitt, with some skepticism, the first indications of interest at the National Inventors Council in his and Hedy’s torpedo:
And now we’ve received word from Mr. Langner, who is head [sic] of the council, and is in town, that he’d like very much to discuss the invention with us! Hedy and I are very excited, and we’re going to see him tomorrow morning at eleven. (Down in my shoes, however, I’ve an idea that perhaps Mr. Langner might only be interested in seeing how the beauteous Hedy appears in full life?)
Antheil was still smarting from his dispute with Hedy the previous winter; in his letter to Bullitt he made it ad hominem:
Hedy is incredibly childish about some things: for instance, she never learned how to write, either in German or English, although she speaks German, French, and English almost flawlessly. When she does write (I’ve caught her taking notes at our conversations) she writes phonetically—in all languages. She is an incredible combination of childish ignorance and stupidity—and definite flashes of genius.
Since Hedy dropped out of school at sixteen, it may be that she never learned to spell words by language. More probably, faced with writing in three or four different languages, she had applied her gift for invention and decided it would be faster and more efficient to write them all phonetically in the notes she made for her personal use. Certainly she wrote and spelled competently in public documents. George Antheil disliked being questioned, as Hedy and Lou Eshman had questioned him, especially since he considered their suspicions unjustified. It also must have been difficult for him, despite his outward bonhomie, to spend time with a twenty-six-year-old woman who was living a life of wealth and fame while he scraped a living doing Hollywood hackwork in a community mostly unaware of his enlarging body of serious compositions—and while his beloved brother lay broken and dead beneath the North Sea, one of the first American casualties of what was still a European war.
Consistent with this analysis, Antheil invested at least as much time during the period when he and Hedy were working on their magnetic proximity shell and radio-controlled torpedo in promoting his theory of glandular criminality as a method potentially useful for analyzing the Axis leadership from afar. He pressed Bullitt for contacts, visited Washington for ten days at his own expense, and met with the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, members of Hoover’s staff, and FBI technical experts. Hoover assured him he was “deeply interested,” Antheil said, but nothing came of it. “I am very unhappy since my brother’s death,” Antheil appealed to Bullitt. “I feel that it is futile to attempt to do anything but help National Defense, nowadays. My mind is busy in a thousand directions; I have boundless energy, nowadays.” He had cured himself of his “Parisian asthma,” he believed, “through adrenal cortex [extract] and did not have a single cold all this winter and I WISH I could do something.”