involved were radar, laser and holography and the design of a control-rod drive mechanism for nuclear reactors in nuclear powered submarines.

Kock’s reputation in electronics was so excellent that in 1964 he was asked to take a leave from Bendix to become the first director of the newly founded NASA Engineering Research Center at Cambridge, M.A., guiding research on aeronautical and space electronics. In 1966 he returned to Bendix directing, inter alia, research on acoustic holography, a field in which he became internationally known. After his retirement from Bendix in 1971 he accepted the position as Director of the Basic and Applied Science Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, the renowned Herman Schneider Laboratory.²⁵

’From electronic organ designer to NASA chief of electronics’ could be a popularized abstract of Kock’s professional life. But does it do justice to the facts? Yes and no. It surely denotes two stages in his career. On the other hand it might be misleading, insinuating that there was a spectacular development from a relatively simple occupation – designing an electronic organ – to a prestigious high tech appointment, one of the most distinguished an electronics engineer in the United States could get. Although they were in different fields both occupations dealt with high technology; the design of electronic organs in the late twenties and early thirties was probably no less demanding than NASA’s laser and advanced radar research of the 1960s.

VI

In the early 1940’s two Americans from the West Coast, the film star Hedy Lamarr and the composer and pianist George Antheil, worked on an improved anti-aircraft gun, but their plans do not seem to have lead anywhere.²⁶

But with their invention of a torpedo control system the story is different. A glamorous actress and an avant-garde composer, an ’enfant terrible of music’, invented and patented a novel radio control device for torpedoes. Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna in 1914 as Eva Maria Kiesler and in her late teens went to the famous Max Reinhard acting school in Berlin. In 1933 she exhibited her physical gifts in the film Exstase (Ecstasy) which soon became well-known and notorious. In a film intended for show in public cinemas there were protracted nude scenes. The film was later shown in America after extensive ‘cleaning’. In 1937 Hedy went to Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer of MGM hired her and suggested the name Lamarr for her. She acted in various movies in the late thirties and early forties with partners like Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy.²⁷

Fritz Mandl, her first husband, was the most important Austrian armament manufacturer of his time and one of the four or five leading armament producers