New book on Antheil Lamarr -- the good and the ugly

There's a new book out by Richard Rhodes about the invention of
a jam-proof torpedo guidance system in 1940 by film star Hedy Lamarr
and composer George Antheil, called "Hedy's Folly."

Rhodes is a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and so the
book has been getting lots of attention, including a front-page review
in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (as well as another Times
review during the week).

Antheil and Lamarr's invention, which was patented but never built,
was quite clever but not very practical.  It was based loosely on
player piano technology, in that the torpedo and the ship launching
it both had perforated paper tapes which served to switch the radio
frequency used to guide the torpedo in synchronization -- therefore
making the signal unjammable by any transmitter that didn't have the
same frequency-hopping instructions.

Rhodes's book isn't the first about this invention: Rob Walters covered
it in "Spread Spectrum," and Tony Rothman devoted a large chapter to it
in "Everything's Relative."  There was also a play in New York a few
years ago by Elyse Singer called "Frequency Hopping," and it is the
subject of a planned Hollywood film called "Face Value."  But Rhodes's
book is valuable for a general readership, and it will serve to bring
the enigma of Hedy Lamarr and the very varied accomplishments of George
Antheil to a larger audience.

Antheil, of course, was famous for trying to use multiple pianolas in
his 1924 "Ballet mécanique," but he failed utterly in that effort, and
all performances of the piece in his lifetime used a single pianola
player piano.

Antheil had a basic misunderstanding of how pianolas worked: he
postulated that he would be able to build an electrical "switchboard"
that would control multiple pianolas from a single "master roll,"
without realizing that the pneumatic players of the time could not be
operated this way.  Perhaps he was thinking of earlier, solenoid-driven
player pianos by companies like Tel-Electric, but those instruments
were long out of production by the time he wrote Ballet mécanique,
and they were completely unknown in Europe.

It wasn't until the 1990s, with the advent of computer-controlled
player pianos, that the piece was able to be performed according
to Antheil's original vision: first by Jürgen Hocker in Germany with
two instruments, and then by me in Massachusetts with 16 (as Antheil
intended).

Unfortunately, Rhodes (who consulted briefly with me about the book
a couple of years ago and sent me a galley proof of it over the
summer), gets this completely wrong.  In the book he states that
Antheil was unable to perform the piece as intended in Paris, but was
able to do it with four synchronized player pianos at Carnegie Hall in
1927.

Where he got this information is a mystery, since every account of that
concert is very clear that there was only a single pianola and multiple
human-played pianos.  Perhaps he (or a researcher of his) simply
misinterpreted one of the accounts and no one bothered to check it.
Had this been true, both Hocker's and my work would have been
unnecessary, but more importantly, it would probably have ushered in
a new era of automated orchestras that could well have ameliorated the
decline of mechanical instruments that was soon to follow.

There are other errors in the book, pointed out by Italian researcher
Mauro Piccinini, such as how long Antheil and his wife lived above the
Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris: Rhodes says it was 10 years,
while in truth it was only four.

Rhodes has acknowledged some of these errors, but told me it was too
late to correct them in the first edition, but he will do so in the
paperback.  We'll have to see.

More unfortunately, many newspapers who have given the book glowing
reviews have perpetuated the myth that Antheil "was an expert at
synchronizing machines" (USA Today), "was an expert in making machines
communicate with one another" (daily NY Times) and had "mastered the
byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls" (Sunday NY Times), none
of which were true.  Worse, the USA Today review repeats the error
about the Carnegie Hall performance.

Rhodes's book is very readable, and gets most of the story right.
But it's a shame that a book that will probably be considered the
definitive account of this intriguing story gets such a basic fact
wrong.

Paul Lehrman
http://antheil.org/