Lamarr spent the rest of her life in America. She was naturalized in 1953. She never permanently returned to Vienna. Her ashes were partly scattered in the Vienna Woods in 2000, after she had been gone for sixty-three years.
## The Mechanics of Player Pianos and Why They Matter
George Antheil’s key contribution to the frequency-hopping patent is understood most clearly by understanding what a player piano actually was and what problem it posed for someone trying to synchronize multiple instruments in performance.
A player piano — also called a pianola — is a self-playing piano that reads a roll of perforated paper to determine which notes to play and when. The paper roll passes over a tracker bar containing a row of small holes, each corresponding to a piano key. When a perforation in the paper aligns with a hole in the tracker bar, air pressure changes in that channel, activating a pneumatic bellows mechanism that drives a key. The rhythm and duration of the notes depend on the size, shape, and spacing of the perforations; the tempo depends on how fast the paper roll advances.
The system is entirely pneumatic — no electronics, no digital signal processing. It is a mechanical encoding of musical information that predates electronic recording by decades. At the peak of player piano’s commercial popularity, in the 1910s and 1920s, the instruments were sophisticated enough that companies commissioned composers to create original rolls that took advantage of the medium’s particular qualities — the ability to strike multiple keys simultaneously in patterns impossible for a human pianist, the ability to sustain notes while changing others, the consistency of mechanical repetition.