Hollywood (H)IT (Part 3)

 

Sometimes it seems that powerful inventions are the result of coincidences. But a look behind the scenes reveals something else. Our attempt to analyze the invention of Spread-Spectrum technology has taken us to the remarkable careers of Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. Traversing their journey, Part 2 of this series plotted dots depicting the first half of the picture. Here are the remaining dots and how they get connected.

Space-Time Continuum: The Fourth Dot
As an avant-garde musician using machines, Antheil became quite well known in Paris, which prompted Ezra Pound to write, "Antheil is probably the first artist to use machines, I mean the actual modern machines."

Pound also praised him in his 1923 book Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony and even claimed that he invented a new sense of time and rhythm: "Antheil is supremely sensitive to the existence of time-space. The use of the term 'fourth dimension' is probably as confusing in Einstein as in Antheil. I believe Einstein is capable of conceiving the factor time as affecting space relations. He does this in a mode hitherto little used, and with certain quirks that had not been used by engineers before him; though the time element enters into engineering computations."

Around that time, the fourth dimension was a hot topic amongst intelligentsia in Europe. Many people credit Bernhard Riemann's 1854 lecture, "On the …

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