Chapter 2: Eighty Eight Keys

Chapter TwoEighty-Eight KeysGeorge 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.