Hedy Lamarr is my hero. Along with George Antheil she invented the first version of frequency hopping that proposed the use of a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The idea was proposed to the Navy, though ultimately they were not interested claiming the system was too bulky. Antheil explicates the Navy’s reasoning:
“In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubted, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words ‘player piano. ‘My god,’ I can see them saying, ‘we shall put a player piano in a torpedo.’”
What a great image.
I’ve been going through the pictures I took in Michigan and prepping them for the web (which has turned out to be rather difficult), and wanted to post this picture of my Grandmother and her great grandson Brady. I was going to write more, but the picture took over.
