Secret [Mis]communication System

Overview

The film is based on the drawings and graphic illustrations taken from the patent “Secret Communication System”, registered as US2292387. When work on radio-controlled torpedoes began in the early 1940s, it became clear that an enemy would have little trouble intercepting the frequency of a control signal. In 1942, to fix that problem, the film actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil proposed changing the carrier frequency of transmitter and receiver by means of a perforated paper tape, of the kind used in a player piano. Lamarr and Antheil’s invention folded musical logic into the mechanics of war, fulfilling the modernist utopia’s hope that art and technological progress might pass into one another.