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E&T Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 9, October 2016

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E&T Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 9, October 2016 88 TIME OUT COLUMNIST One of the great joys of inventing something is being able to name it – unless of course no one is meant to know about it. That’s how Léon Theremin ended up the proud inventor of a device called ‘The Thing’. by Justin Pollard SPY EQUIPMENT Competition himself listening in to his American colleagues on an open FEAR AT THE HEART What is The Thing thinking? channel. It was just by luck that The wittiest caption emailed he happened to be listening on OF POWER: THEREMIN to [email protected] the right frequency when the by 5 October 2016 wins a Soviets were ‘painting’ the Thing AND THE THING pair of books from Haynes. with its radio signal. The Americans were informed and in March 1951 the official residence. What he didn’t device was discovered inside the know was that, from that Great Seal. The device was moment, it was transmitting his quickly copied by the British conversations back to the NKVD. and Americans and rapidly Now, the Americans weren’t installed wherever they might idiots. They were aware that get away with it. unprompted gifts from Soviet The idea of a passive institutions might contain more electronic transmitting device than they bargained for and they has since taken on a life of its expected attempts to be made to own – we just don’t call them bug the ambassador’s residence ‘Things’, we call them RFIDs. So in Moscow. Gifts were checked to next time you’re making a make sure they weren’t contactless payment, or using an ‘transmitting’ and the rooms Oystercard, it’s worth were regularly swept for bugs. remembering that this The Great Seal came up clean extraordinary everyday every time. technology owes its existence to Yet of course it wasn’t. Hidden the inventor of the Theremin’s deep inside the wooden seal was spell in a Soviet gulag. * a small electrical device, weighing just over an ounce. It CAPTION PRIZES was so secret, so puzzling and so fiendish it was simply called ‘The BAG A BOOK LÉON THEREMIN was an affairs. However, the only people Thing’. exceptional electronics who knew his location were the The Thing had no battery pack engineer by any standards. The NKVD – predecessor to the KGB and no active electronic founding father of electronic – who had him in custody. components, so bug sweeps never music, he was the creator of Of course Theremin, like his showed it up. It appeared to be a the eponymous Theremin (or fellow Sharashka workers completely dead packet of etherphone as he preferred Andrei Tupolev and Sergei electronics, but that was to call it), the designer of the Korolev, was not your ordinary Theremin’s genius. This was a world’s first drum machine and Stalinist prisoner, and so was put passive cavity resonator, a the inventor of interlaced video. to work on a special project, miniature capacitive membrane He was an undoubted genius. directing his encyclopaedic connected to an antenna to form This month’s competition Yet perhaps his most successful knowledge of radio engineering an electronic listening device. winner will receive copies invention had no name at all. towards espionage devices. The device only became active of ‘How to Run the Country Theremin had already His first success was the when a radio signal of the Manual’ and ‘Great War Tank established an interesting career Buran eavesdropping system, correct frequency was fired at it, Manual’, two new titles from by the time he arrived at a which bounced a low-power providing it with the power it the ever-expanding range Sharashka, one of the secret infrared beam off windows to needed to operate. When people of Haynes Manuals (haynes. research and development record vibrations produced by in the room talked, the sound co.uk). Winner of our July issue laboratories that formed part of voices in the room, thus waves caused the membrane to competition is John Nayler: the Soviet gulag labour camp reconstructing the conversation. vibrate, changing the “Little do they know that I am system. Having survived the This was the precursor of all capacitance which in turn an undercover policeman.” Russian Revolution and modern laser microphones. modulated the radio waves that subsequent Civil War, he had Yet his greatest achievement struck it and were retransmitted toured the world with his was still more secret. On by the device itself. revolutionary musical 4 August 1945, a delegation from For seven years, The Thing sat instruments before finally the Young Pioneer organisation on the wall in the Ambassador’s settling in New York. of the Soviet Union presented a office, with no batteries to Then in 1938, he simply beautiful carving of the Great change and no active components ‘disappeared’. Some said the Seal of the United States of to give it away. It might still be Soviets had abducted him, others America to the US ambassador in there now, were it not for a radio thought he had fled the country Moscow. He was so taken with it operator at the British embassy due to ‘irregularities’ in his tax that he had it hanging in his who suddenly one day found Engineering & Technology October 2016 www.EandTmagazine.com C2201_R23395_Columns_88.BK.indd 88 07/09/2016 15:11.
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