Leon Theremin
| Léon Theremin | |
|---|---|
Lev Termen demonstrating Termenvox, c. December 1927
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| Born |
Lev Sergeyevich Termen 15 August 1896 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
| Died | 3 November 1993 (aged 97) Moscow, Russia |
| Occupation | engineer, physicist |
| Known for | Theremin, The Thing |
Lev Sergeyevich Termen (Russian: Лев Сергеевич Термен) (27 August [O.S. 15 August] 1896 – 3 November 1993), or Léon Theremin in the United States, was a Russian and Soviet 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 devised the interlace technique for improving the quality of a video signal, still widely used in video and television technology. His 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.
Léon Theremin was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1896 into a family of French Huguenot and 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, and a singer named Wagz 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 everyday, unlike others that talked more of somewhat abstract formula 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. Later, Kyrill introduced Theremin to Ioffe as a young experimenter and physicist, and future student of the university.
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