I’ve been browsing the Wonderland of Knowledge again — the twelve-volume children’s encyclopedia, published 1934 which was the source of the Two Stags image that I believe is still the most-visited post in this blog’s existence, and also of the Datura logo at the top left of this very page — and I found this picture of Leon Theremin at his instrument — a picture not otherwise available on the interweb, if the first 500 or so image results on Google are anything to go by. Don’t say I never give you anything.

I don’t have anything to add to the biographical info available in a dozen other places — why would I? — but a swift recap:

Theremin was the father of electronic music. He invented his instrument in 1919 and became quite the sensation all over Europe and eventually in the USA, where he settled and set up a laboratory, apparently under the patronage of Albert Einstein and others. During this period he invented a couple or three other electronic instruments, including something called the Rhytmicon, descriptions of which suggest that Theremin was a pioneer of interactive art, long before that stuff had a name.

In 1938, however, he vanished, not to be heard of again in the west for nearly thirty years. Some thought he had been abducted by the Soviets, although there is some evidence that suggests he ran into financial difficulties in America (it’s easily done). In any event, he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union and sent to a labour camp, where he worked on various shady projects, including, as it turned out, the invention of the world’s first covert listening device — an early model of which was embedded in a carved wooden ornament of the Great Seal of the United States given to the American ambassador by Soviet schoolchildren in 1945, and which hung in the ambassador’s residence for seven years before the bug was discovered…

The best of the one-page biographies of Theremin that I’ve come across is the one at MoogMusic