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Theremin's Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actually quite tragic. In addition to that story, Adam Fabio takes a trip through the details of "The Thing", a bug installed in the US Embassy by the Soviet Union during the cold war. It used no batteries, instead depending on a carrier frequency transmitted by the "listener", causing the resonant cavity to transmit back the audio from the room at a higher frequency. Pretty nifty, and so was the hiding place: a hand-carved wooden seal of the United States. Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts, right?
Apart from a few episodes where an electronic organ or synthesizer was used, the theremin-like sound on the original Star Trek theme was actually provided by renowned studio soprano Loulie Jean Norman until her voice was removed in later seasons.
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A Doctor Who reference would have been nice.
Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This, my friends, is the geekiest thing you will see today. Trekkie plays Star Trek theme on Theremin.
Better known as 318230.
There was a show called Dark Matters that did a segment on this. The show itself had shitty production values, sometimes went a bit heavy with sensationalism, and the facts were a bit dubious... but some of the segments were decent, and the Theremin one was one of them.
He was kidnapped out of NYC by Stalin's operatives to help in the war effort (WWII). Unbelievable.
Yeah. I thought the only reason it was "made famous" was because Sheldon played it on The Big Bang Theory....
We publish about 10 posts a day on Hackaday so it's certainly not every post. But I've long been a Slashdot reader, so when we have a great piece of content that I think fits here I try to submit it.
It's like the old joke of the Soviet hell...
Seriously, what we get is either not news or not for nerds. This may be for nerds, but news? That story is like half a century old, that's even old by /. standards!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed. I don't recall hearing a Theremin in either version of the theme.
However, a Theremin IS used in the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations". That is probably the most famous use. Way before "Big Bang Theory".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Theremins were geek-popular long before the Internet existed - let alone recent, forgettable television series...
#DeleteChrome
They have 400+ episodes of the early Doctors before Eccleston. If you didn't grow up on low budget British television it might be hard to watch at first but if you stick with it you get an appreciation for the different personalities of the Doctors.
Yea, Cello was only "made famous" because Leonard played it on the Big Bang Theory too...
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
as the audio had this piercing whine that rose and fell in pitch all the time (weeeeeeoooooooeeeeeeeooooooooo!).
I cringed at the sentence "Receive tuning (if it can be called such) was achieved by the precisely cut antenna." which is actually how EVERY radio is tuned; the antenna is a component of the resonant circuit which forms the receiver.
I've read about the bugged seal for years, when I was a kid it was used as an example how how nasty Soviets could never be trusted. It's an interesting story - but honestly, the story of the US embassy built in Moscow in the early 1980s is much more interesting. I knew two people involved with the analysis of the building and it's a fascinating case of hubris. The US felt that they could detect any passive resonant cavity devices using the same techniques they used for "The Thing" and, more importantly, for active radios, they could detect them by a non-linear junction detector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector) which finds the P-N junctions of diodes and transistors.
The Soviets, knowing this, simply dumped a bunch of diodes in the concrete used for the building meaning that everywhere in the building, the diodes would be found and could not be distinguished from any other electronic devices in the building making the search for bugging devices impossible.
My friends spent several months chipping at the concrete walls of the embassy and never found any listening devices, just diodes which were labouriously separated from the concrete. It's interesting to see articles of the day (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/15/world/the-bugged-embassy-case-what-went-wrong.html?pagewanted=all & http://articles.latimes.com/19...) claiming that listening devices were found in the building but what I was told was that there were a few pieces of rebar which were not properly installed and about $500 worth of diodes mixed into the concrete. The claims of listening devices are most likely exaggerated to lessen the embarrassment that the Soviets had pulled over such a big coup over on the US for what amounts to petty cash.
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sorry I have no imagination so I can't create one.
mfwright@batnet.com
More importantly, the use of the bug is hardly news. Hell, I remember when it *was* news.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Though you can play Star Trek on a theremin, the original Trek theme was a fairly traditional orchestral score.
Or did they? Is it possible they had been trolling the Soviets for 7 years to discuss phony "top secret" things in such rooms that are not covered with Faraday's cage wall paper?
Or have I been reading too many Irwin Wallace, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins and am giving too much credit to the bureaucrats working on Government pay-scale GS-11 counting days till retirement?
Or am I so showing my age with this list of authors which makes the slashdot reading whippersnappers go "Irwin who? What Forsyth?"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It was not a true theremin used on the Beach Boy's song, but an Electro-Theremin, which is in fact a different device, even if the sound is similar. The Electro-Theremin uses knobs, slide potential controls, etc. It is not played "in space" like the Theremin is.
The replica is at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. and the original is at the NSA Cryptological Museum.
I have seen them both and the replica is a very poor copy of the original wood carving.
It currently hangs in the National Cryptologic Museum with a placard talking about its history after all..
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryp...
Unless this is a different bugged wooden seal...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Bob Moog started his electronic instrument business offering Theremin kits to hobbyists, IIRC.
Nope, that'd be the one. Well, except I thought it was a bit later than that. That says it was found in 1952. It turns out, it wasn't even news when I heard about it as a child. :/ (Probably 10-15 years later, mid to late 1960s.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Indeed. I don't recall hearing a Theremin in either version of the theme.
However, a Theremin IS used in the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations". That is probably the most famous use. Way before "Big Bang Theory".
I'd have said the most famous use was in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" fom the 1950s.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"I'd have said the most famous use was in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" fom the 1950s."
The sound of a theremin pretty much _defines_ 1950s B-grade scifi.
And I'd regard Forbidden Planet as more famous. :)
I met Theremin about a year before he died. It was at Stanford, at an electronic music celebration for him. Just about all of the big names in electronic music were there. I went because my wife is a big fan of radical music.
Many years before that, my father had Theremin's spy gadget in his office in the Pentagon when he was chief of the scientific section of G2. It was dead simple, a resonate cavity with a diaphragm to pick up sound and modulate the outgoing signal.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain