George Antheil

George Antheil
Detail from a portrait of Antheil, by American photographer Berenice Abbott, c. 1927
Born	July 8, 1900 (1900-07-08) Trenton, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	February 12, 1959 (1959-02-13) (aged 58) New York, New York, U.S.
Occupations	Composer pianist author inventor
Spouse	Boski Markus ​ (m. 1925)​
Children	1
Signature

George Johann Carl Antheil (/ˈæntaɪl/; 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]