HEDY MAG ISSUE 1

ce. In comes George Antheil, a multifaceted
genius avant-garde futurist pianist and also
Hedy’s neighbour in California. Antheil was a
sort of Brian Eno of his time and had come up
with all sorts of innovative gizmos in order to
Make Music Differently—among which was a
little invention that had allowed him to come
up with a way of getting a piano to play automatically.
It basically consisted of a paper roll
with slots on 88 different places (corresponding
to the number of keys in a piano) that’d
prompt the different keys to play during a certain
number of beats. If the transmitter and the
receiver were equipped with the same sequence
of ‘jumps’ and triggered off at the same time,
they’d stay in sync during broadcast. And so
frequency hopping was born. Hedy and George
Antheil got a patent in 1942. And… that’s
it. The U.S. Navy decided, so to speak, to pass
(because, honestly, how was taking seriously
an invention penned by an eccentric bohemian
pianist and a Hollywood starlet not a stretch,
gentlemen!) To add insult to injury, when Hedy
requested to join the National Inventors Council,
she was told she should sell War Bonds if she
wanted to help. Frequency-hopping technology
to keep torpedoes on course wasn’t used until
1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when
the patent had already expired. Hedy’s career in
Hollywood progressively declined until it became
practically non-existent in the 1960s, a fact
exacerbated by a spell of shoplifting or two that
HEDY 11