as a device for protecting a baby from kidnappers, an issue hotly debated after the abduction of the Lindbergh baby. A different system which Termen recommended for use in railway traffic signalling was sensitive to temperature changes and used as a fire alarm device.

As to musical instruments he designed a four-octave monophonic keyboard instrument in 1928 and an electronic cello in 1930. In 1931, on commission from the composer Henry Cowell, he built a drum machine, the ‘rhythmicon’ or ‘polyrhythmophone’, a keyboard instrument based on the theremin.

Soon Termen became a darling of New York society. In his studios on West 54th Street he entertained Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin, the then Lieutenant-Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower as well as Leslie Groves, the energetic officer later responsible for the organisation of the ‘Manhattan Project’. Albert Einstein, too, came to Termen’s 54th Street residence and is even said to have joined in an improvisatory jazz duet on a theme by Gershwin with Termen on his aetherophon and Einstein himself on the violin.

The affection of many of his friends decreased significantly when he married Lavina Williams, a member of the first African-American dance company. This was not socially correct. Shortly afterwards Termen’s good humoured personality was put under strain even more. During his stay in the United States he regularly met agents of the KGB. In 1938 they abducted him – in a 1988 interview with the ’Moscow News’ he stated that he was ‘summoned’ to Moscow – and brought him to the Soviet Union.⁷

On the charge of anti-Soviet propaganda, a very unspecified blame, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment and brought to a notorious prison camp in Siberia. Obviously he was not of much use there for the government and the military so that after six months the Soviet authorities transferred him to a military research institute to do research on radar, signal and sensor technology. His living circumstances were not exactly lavish, but some of his colleagues and assistants were first-class: among others the well-known aircraft designer Andrej Tupolev, who cooperated with him on a radio control project for pilot-free aircraft, assistant at the time was Sergej Korolov, who later was to become head of the much celebrated Soviet space program.

From the end of the Second World War onwards and in the context of the ‘Cold War’ Eastern and Western intelligence services and the military strongly supported the development of electronic listening devices. Termen designed such a device called ‘Buran’ which used a directional microphone and allowed the KGB to overhear conversations through the open windows of foreign embassies in Moscow. For this he received the Stalin Prize in 1949. In the early 1950s he also developed the ‘bug’ for inside overhearing. Hidden inside the wooden carving of the great seal of the US in the United States embassy in Moscow it was extremely effective and created a diplomatic scandal when detected. Nowadays the ‘bug’ is ubiquitous in surveillance for whatever purpose. In 1964 Termen was appointed Professor of Acoustics at the University of Moscow; in the late 1980s he again visited the