Ironically, the aesthetics of a torpedo guided by musical notes may have been a fatal “design flaw” in stoking an “anti-cultural bias” among the military types who examined the patent, as Antheil surmises:
“In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words ‘player piano.’ ‘My God,’ I can see them saying, ‘we shall put a player piano in a torpedo’” (Cited by Couey).
