Eighty-Eight Keys

George visits Hedy Lamarr at her quiet Spanish colonial home expecting glamour but finds a workspace filled with technical sketches, equations, and engineering tools. Hedy explains her frequency-hopping idea to prevent radio-guided torpedo signals from being jammed, but admits she cannot solve the synchronisation problem without revealing the hopping sequence. George Antheil realises the answer through player-piano technology: two identical perforated paper rolls encoding the hop pattern, started together to keep transmitter and receiver synchronised, using eighty-eight frequencies like piano keys.

George Antheil Meets Hedy Lamarr

Composer George Antheil, now writing Hollywood film scores and feeling creatively diminished, stands bored at a Brentwood party when he is introduced to actress Hedy Lamarr.

Their conversation quickly shifts from Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique and mechanical synchronisation to his Esquire column, and then to the war, as Lamarr recounts learning about weapons while married to arms dealer Friedrich Mandl.

She explains how radio-guided torpedoes can be jammed due to reliance on a single frequency and says she has a solution but needs someone skilled in mechanical synchronisation.