The Thing

Leon Sergeivitch Termen, born in St. Petersberg in 1896, is today

known as the inventor of electronic music. In 1917 he introduced his
first Therminvox, better known as Theremin, in the USSR. After Lenin
heard this mysterious instrument at the Moscow Industrial Fair in 1920
he not just requested private lessons, but also produced 600
Theremins. In the following 7 years he send Leon Termin all over the
USSR and Czechoslovakia to promote is unique invention and to
establish his reputation. In 1927 Leon Termin arrived in New York
after spending several month in London. By than he was already widely
known and only one year later, in 1928 he was granted a US patent for
the Therminvox. Prof. Termin spent the following 8 years in New York,
living the rather extravagant but non the less unsuspicious life of an
eccentric. In 1938 he suddenly left New York to return to the USSR.
Termin biographers seem to promote the idea that he was kidnapped out
of his apartment by the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The CIA
however, now knows, backed by Soviet Union admission, that Leon Termin
left New York, voluntarily, on a departing AMTORC freighter. AMTORC,
the American Trading Corporation, was a Russian front company, mainly
operating as a contact for Russian spies in the US. In 1938 Leon
Termin was certainly not unknown to them Prior to his rather sudden
departure, he used his carefully established reputation and his
technical understanding to collect detailed information on granted and
pending US patents, sending them all the while to the USSR. Once he
returned, to the now Stalin run Soviet Union, he spend one year in a
KGB Gulug in Siberia. In 1939 he was moved to a Sharashka, a prison
camp around a government institution, where he started work on his
truly ground braking and unique cold-war invention
Leon Teremin, who had worked with electromagnetic fields, capacitance,
and induction all his life, developed a light bulb that would respond
to vibrations, by the use of a gas rather sensitive to capacitance.
Since it seemed difficult to smuggle a light bulb into the US embassy,
and since the average life span of a light bulb was to too short to
guarantee ongoing transmission, he then revised the light bulb until
he developed the passive resonator cavity.
In 1947 a group of Russian boy scouts appeared at the US embassy in
Moscow, under the auspices of presenting the American ambassador with
a woodcarving of the US emblem. After thoroughly checking it for
possible bugs, usually microphones, wired to recording devices at a
location nearby, the ambassador proudly hung it onto his office wall.
Little did he know that embedded in the emblem, was Theremins latest
invention - a 9 long and 11/16 wide metal bar connected to a tuned
cavity, which was designed to reveal American secrets to the
Soviets. The device, activated by a 330 MHz microwave beam, picked up
vibrations from voices in the room. The vibrations altered the
capacitance of the circuit in the tuned cavity, which modulated the
330 MHz microwave beam. On the receiving end the fluctuation in the
beam was simply transduced back to sound, therewith transmitting every
conversation, word by word, without the use of a physical wire.
Given the novelty and uniqueness of the device, it was not detected
until 1952. By than it had become obvious, that the Soviets were
listening in on conversations in the American ambassadors office. A
team of technicians searched every inch of the office for bugs without
success since, without the microwave beam activated, there were no
active components in Teremins device. As usual, the American
Counter-Espionage personnel were searching for devices using known
technology, meaning some kinds of wires, batteries, and recording
devices. After the latest of many fruitless searches, the technicians
left the office, except for one, who hid on the floor. After the team
left however, not realizing that one technician had remained in the
room, the Soviets reactivated the microwave beam which was then picked
up by the hidden American agent. With the help of a signal strength
meter, he was able to trace the signal back to the wall that held the
woodcarving. Since nobody expected a bug as small as the cavity,
agents started tarring down the wall. They found nothing. It wasnt
until then, that they decided to examine the woodcarving. Sure
enough, the cavity was found and for a lack of words it was called The
Thing.
The Thing was examined and studied by the Americans without success.
Finally it was sent to England where Peter Right started bombarding it
with a variety of Radio Frequencies. Eventually he received a
harmonic of the 330 MHz signal, thereby finally solving the riddle.
But Teremin didnt stop there. After the The Thing was detected, he
started developing more sophisticated listening and bugging devices
for the KGB. His last known invention picked up vibrations by
sending an infrared beam to a window, modulating the beam via the
vibrations from voices in the room, and bouncing the now modulated
infrared beam back to a detector for conversion back to sound, a
technology that has been used and further developed ever since.