19421776 Club
A Hollywood actress and a composer patent a way to jam-proof Navy torpedoes
The system borrows its timing from a player piano; the Navy calls it too bulky to use.
By 1942 German U-boats were sinking Allied ships faster than shipyards could replace them, and radio-guided torpedoes could be jammed simply by broadcasting noise on their control frequency. On August 11, 1942, the U.S. Patent Office granted Patent 2,292,387 to Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil for a "Secret Communication System" that hopped signals across frequencies too fast for an enemy to track. Markey was better known by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr. The Navy took one look at the mechanism and rejected it as too bulky to fit inside a torpedo…
