Antheil disagreed; he insisted that it could be made small enough to squeeze into a watch. And he thought he knew why the Navy was so negative: "In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubted, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words 'player piano. 'My god,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player piano in a torpedo.'" In other words, it was a culture clash: the thick-headed brass hats were incapable of considering the idea that musical technology could play any part in a complicated piece of weaponry. But Antheil's explanation is too simple; the invention had other problems. Describing them requires looking at other developments in torpedo control  at the time, especially in Germany. In the United States Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil, shunned by the Navy, no longer pursued their invention. But in 1957, the concept was taken up by engineers at the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division, in Buffalo, New York. Their arrangement, using, of course, electronics rather than piano rolls, ultimately became a basic tool for secure military communications. It was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962, about three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent had expired. Subsequent patents in frequency changing, which are generally unrelated to torpedo control, have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal anti-jamming device used today, for example, in the U.S. government's Milstar defense communication satellite system. -Information Source: American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 1997, Volume 12/Number 4.

Hedy Lamarr achieved international renown in 1933, when the barely 18-year-old girl played the first nude scene  in cinematic history in the Czech film "Ecstasy." The film was banned in many countries around the world, or only an expurgated version of it was permitted to be shown. In that same year, on August 10, 1933, Hedy Kiesler married the Austrian industrialist Fritz Mandl, CEO of the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, then one of the world's leading arms producers. The marriage was an unhappy one. As Mrs. Fritz Mandl, she was, indeed, at the center of the Viennese high society ; nevertheless, she suffered under the domineering regime of a husband who forbade her to pursue her acting career.