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Concept
Leon Theremin
Summary
Lev Sergeyevich Termen (Лев Сергеевич Термен; 1896 - 3 November 1993), better known as Leon Theremin, was a Russian inventor, most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass-produced. He also worked on early television research. His secret listening device, "The Thing", hung for seven years in plain view in the United States Ambassador's Moscow office and enabled Soviet agents to eavesdrop on secret conversations.
Leon Theremin was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1896. His father was Sergei Emilievich Theremin, of French Huguenot descent. His mother was Yevgenia Antonova Orzhinskaya and of German ancestry. He had a sister named Helena.
In the seventh class of his high school before an audience of students and parents he demonstrated various optical effects using electricity.
By the age of 17, when he was in his last year of high school, he had his own laboratory at home for experimenting with high-frequency circuits, optics and magnetic fields. His cousin, Kirill Fedorovich Nesturkh, then a young physicist, invited him to attend the defense of the dissertation of Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. Physics lecturer Vladimir Konstantinovich Lebedinskiy had explained to Theremin the dispute over Ioffe's work on the electron. On 9 May 1913 Theremin and his cousin attended Ioffe's dissertation defense. Ioffe's subject was on the elementary photoelectric effect, the magnetic field of cathode rays and related investigations. In 1917 Theremin wrote that Ioffe talked of electrons, the photoelectric effect and magnetic fields as parts of an objective reality that surrounds us every day, unlike others that talked more of somewhat abstract formulae and symbols. Theremin wrote that he found this explanation revelatory and that it fit a scientific – not abstract – view of the world, different scales of magnitude, and matter. From then on Theremin endeavoured to study the microcosm, in the same way he had studied the macrocosm with his hand-built telescope.
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