A pianist walks on stage in 1920s Paris, sets a loaded revolver on top of the piano, and starts to play. That was George Antheil, the self-styled bad boy of music who flunked out of Trenton Central High School, secured a 20-year stipend from Mary Louise Curtis Bok, badgered Ernest Bloch into teaching him, and moved into an apartment above Shakespeare and Company where Sylvia Beach introduced him to Joyce, Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. This episode follows his riotous Paris debut, which may have been staged for a Marcel L’Herbier film crew, and his catastrophic 1927 Carnegie Hall premiere of Ballet Mécanique.

The story then takes an astonishing turn. After fleeing a ruined reputation and rising fascism for a Hollywood career scoring more than 30 films, Antheil reinvented himself as a syndicated columnist on glandular criminology, which is how he met actress Hedy Lamarr. Together they designed an unjammable torpedo guidance system that hopped across 88 radio frequencies using synchronized punched paper rolls, exactly the mechanism of the player pianos Antheil had failed to synchronize years earlier. The Navy dismissed the 1942 patent, Antheil died in 1959 believing himself a footnote, and the concept resurfaced during the Cuban Missile Crisis before becoming the foundation of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and CDMA.

• How Antheil built a personal brand of industrial chaos when his father actually ran a shoe store
• The airplane propellers, siren, and 16 player pianos that turned Ballet Mécanique into slapstick at Carnegie Hall
• Why laughter, not anger, was the death sentence for an avant-garde provocateur
• How a punched paper roll became a radio-frequency switch and why 88 channels echoed a piano keyboard
• Why the military pictured a wooden piano stuffed inside a torpedo and shelved an idea that now runs the wireless world