The paper strips they described resembled player piano rolls in form. Antheil later noted that the patent’s design accommodated up to eighty-eight carrier frequencies — the exact number of keys on a standard piano keyboard. This was probably not an accident. The player piano was his reference point, and the analogy ran deep enough to determine the scale of the design.
## The National Inventors Council and the Navy
After filing the patent application, Lamarr and Antheil brought their proposal to the National Inventors Council, a body that had been established in 1940 to channel civilian inventions toward military use. The Council showed interest. The patent was passed to the Navy for evaluation.
The Navy declined it.
The reasons the Navy gave, and the reasons historians and engineers have subsequently speculated about, do not fully overlap. The official explanation concerned practicality: miniaturizing the proposed paper-strip mechanism to fit inside a torpedo was, with 1942 technology, genuinely difficult. The system as designed was mechanical and relatively bulky. The Navy’s engineers concluded that the technical obstacles were too substantial for wartime implementation.
Whether this was the complete story has been disputed. Antheil, in Bad Boy of Music, suggested that the rejection may have had something to do with the fact that the inventor’s most famous appearance was in a film that had been condemned by the Pope. The inference — that naval officers dismissed the proposal in part because one of the inventors was a Hollywood actress associated with a scandalous film — cannot be documented with any single piece of evidence, but it fits a pattern of institutional behavior that historians of science and gender have documented extensively in other contexts. Women inventors throughout the twentieth century faced dismissal that male inventors with equivalent credentials did not routinely face.