The Inventor of the Theremin Vanished Into a Soviet Lab

In October 1920, a 24-year-old physicist named Lev Sergeyevich Termen demonstrated a strange wooden box at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd. It had two antennas — a vertical rod and a horizontal loop — and made a continuous, eerie tone whose pitch and volume responded to the position of his hands in the air around them. He played a few short pieces. No one had ever heard a musical instrument that did not need to be touched.

The theremin made him famous. Lenin watched a private demonstration in 1922 and sent him on a long Soviet promotional tour through Europe and, eventually, the United States. By 1927 he was living in a townhouse on West 54th Street in Manhattan, performing at Carnegie Hall, designing a fingerprint scanner for Alcatraz, and licensing the instrument to RCA. Then, in 1938, he was suddenly back in Moscow. The biographer Albert Glinsky later argued that personal debts had pushed him home and Stalin's purges had caught him on arrival.

The Soviet authorities sent him to a sharashka — a prison laboratory — where he was put to work on listening devices. In 1945 a delegation of Soviet schoolchildren presented the new US ambassador, Averell Harriman, with a hand-carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States as a gesture of wartime friendship. Harriman hung it in his Moscow study. Inside it was a Theremin invention soon known to American counter-intelligence as "The Thing": a passive resonant cavity that needed no batteries and no internal power, only a microwave beam aimed at it from across the street to retransmit the conversations in the room.

It hung there, transmitting, through four ambassadors and seven years before the State Department finally found it in 1952. Theremin lived to 97 and died in Moscow in 1993, a few months after the music school named for him reopened.