Why did the CIA hate the theremin?
What do the sandwich, the guillotine and the theremin all have in common?
I’m sure Victoria Coren Mitchell would be able to rattle off a quite frankly dazzling array of connections between the three otherwise disparate inventions, but the immediate is that each of them is named after their inventor. Respectively, they are John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who didn’t actually invent the mechanism for his execution device but did propose the mechanism to the French National Assembly as an execution method that kept pain at a minimum.
Finally, there’s Leon Theremin. Quite possibly the most interesting man on the list. Especially because in the grand scheme of his inventions, the musical instrument he lends his name to might be one of the least influential. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1896, Theremin was a science prodigy from an early age, with a laboratory in his family home by the time he was 17. He was beginning to get noticed by the leading lights of Russian science until he was called up for national service in 1916. Little thing called World War One, you might have heard of it.
However, Theremin’s keen mind kept him out of the front lines and in the world of military engineering. A world he would stay closely connected to throughout his life. It’s rather fitting, though, that despite ostensibly working for military intelligence, the most important invention he made was the musical instrument he gave his name to in 1920. A device made entirely by accident while trying to invent a device that would make noise if it detected movement near it. The Russians immediately saw this as an opportunity to show off their cultural superiority and sent Theremin off on a world tour, demonstrating his new instrument.
How did Theremin make his name on the world stage?
Beginning in 1927, Theremin spent the next decade taking in the rest of the world playing this new instrument. Most of his time was spent in the United States, and his genius wasn’t unnoticed by the US Government, which made inroads to have Theremin work for them. Those connections with the Americans, plus Theremin’s marriage to the Black American ballet prima donna Lavinia Williams, saw the Soviets abruptly pull the plug on his tour in 1938. Bundling Theremin back to Mother Russia in a way that, if you asked them, was entirely his idea. Honest.
Perhaps the time spent working in a gulag as punishment for his transgressions was also his idea too. After a period of “rehabilitation”, the Soviets got Theremin back to work in the military research division, where Theremin made the invention that would make him an eternal enemy of the CIA.
He made the Buran eavesdropping system, a precursor to the modern-day laser microphone. This was promptly hidden in an enormous wooden Great Seal of the United States and presented to the US Ambassador to Russia by a group of Russian school children.
A gesture of “goodwill” to their allies against the Axis, this listening device hung in the US ambassador’s office for seven years before anyone cottoned on. Theremin would live until the age of 97, and I can imagine that a day didn’t go by in Langley that the name Theremin wasn’t cursed to high heavens, no matter how much amazing, progressive music he was directly responsible for.