George Antheil

George Antheil
Detail from a portrait of Antheil, by American photographer Berenice Abbott, c. 1927
BornJuly 8, 1900 (1900-07-08)
DiedFebruary 12, 1959 (1959-02-13) (aged 58)
Occupations
Spouse
Boski Markus
(m. 1925)
Children1
Signature

George Johann Carl Antheil (/ˈæntl/ AN-tyle; July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century. Spending much of the 1920s in Europe, Antheil returned to the United States in the 1930s, and thereafter composed music for films, and eventually, television. As a result of this work, his style became more tonal. A man of diverse interests and talents, Antheil was constantly reinventing himself. He wrote magazine articles, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and newspaper and music columns.

In 1941, Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code (stored on a punched paper tape) to synchronize frequency changes, referred to as frequency hopping, between the transmitter and receiver. It is one of the spread spectrum techniques that became widely used in modern telecommunications. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.[1]

  1. ^ "Spotlight – National Inventors Hall of Fame". invent.org. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2016.