Theremin Blind
By September of 1938, American listeners had become accustomed to
new and eerie sounds as they tuned their radios on Thursday nights to follow the
crime-fighting adventures of the Green Hornet. The mysterious buzz of his
“Hornet’s sting” that introduced the program was a relatively new sound created
by the electronic instrument, the Theremin. The announcer followed with a
declaration that the Hornet “hunts the biggest of all game—public enemies who
try to destroy our America!”
While the fictional masked Hornet was busy fighting spies, traitors, and
other criminals, the Theremin’s inventor, Leon Theremin, had completed his
espionage work in the United States, and was being whisked back to his
homeland of Russia aboard the ship the Stmy Bolshevik (Glinsky 190).
Theremin’s long and fascinating life was shrouded in mystery.
Researchers and historians still dispute his motives, and whether certain events
in his life actually occurred. There is no disagreement, though, that Theremin
was brilliant, creative, charming, and charismatic. He created not only the
Theremin—one of the world’s first synthesizers—but also a wide array of
devices, from wireless alarm systems to surveillance equipment.
Even here, the evidence is murky. Did Theremin invent the first RFID
(radio frequency identification device)? There is widespread belief that he did,
as verified by no less an authority than a newsletter of the Information Systems
Security Association. In December of 2005, the ISSA newsletter of the
Baltimore chapter said: “In 1945 Leon Theremin invented an espionage tool for
the Soviet government. Even though this device was a passive covert listening
device, not an identif ication tag, it has been attributed as the ‘first known’
device and a predecessor to RFID technology” (Dollen 2).
On the other hand, another authority, the RFID Resource Center, has
said that “although some people think that the first known device may have been
invented by Leon Theremin as an espionage tool for the Russian Government in
1945, the first real usage of RFID devices predates that. During World War II
the United Kingdom used RFID devices to distinguish returning English
airplanes from inbound German ones” (“History of RFID Tags”). To add to the
conflision (and there definitely is confusion here—the language is virtually
identical, although it is unclear which of these Internet sources used the phrase
first) Kenny Fong of Southern Illinois University’s Computer Science
Department, also has written of the “Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) systems to
distinguish returning British airplanes from inbound German ones” (Fong 13).
Fong, nevertheless, went further to allege that Theremin invented the infamous
“RFID listening device (‘bug’), which was embedded in a wooden plague [sic]
and presented to the American ambassador Averell Harriman in Moscow by
Soviet schoolchildren in 1946.” Harriman hung the plaque on a wall in the