The American avant garde composer George Antheil, the Bad Boy of Music, (the title of his 1945 autobiography), is best known for a piece he wrote in Paris in his mid-20s, “Ballet Mécanique.” The work was originally conceived as a twenty five minute score to accompany a Dadaist silent film by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. The piece was intended to be performed by sixteen synchronized player pianos, but Antheil could never figure out how to get the pianos to play in sync. Together with the actress Hedy Lamarr, best known as a screen goddess of the late-1930s and ’40s. submitted an idea of a secret communication system to the U.S. patent office in June 1941

On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and “Hedy Kiesler Markey”, Lamarr’s married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used 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 not implemented until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during the blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired.

Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections, and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.