Things Léon Theremin did besides inventing the theremin
(according to his Wikipedia page)
- built a million-watt Tesla coil in his home laboratory while still in high school
- during the Russian Civil War, evacuated a threatened radio station building and then blew it up before it could be captured
- experimented with hypnosis For Science
- worked with Ivan Pavlov’s lab
- invented the motion detector
- oh and he also invented interlacing and developed a working television…in 1927
- played the cello and invented a theremin cello
- co-invented the first drum machine
- built a metal detector for the prison on Alcatraz
- while living in New York in the 1930s, worked with the American Negro Ballet Company and married their prima ballerina Lavinia Williams
- may have been kidnapped back to the Soviet Union
- got sent to a gold mine gulag in Siberia, and then was transferred to a secret laboratory staffed by political prisoners
- you know that story about Soviet schoolchildren presenting a copy of the Great Seal to the American ambassador in Moscow that turned out to be a listening device? he built that too
- taught students and built instruments at the Moscow Conservatory of Music until the director fired him because “electricity is not good for music; electricity is to be used for electrocution”
- became a professor of physics instead
- gave his final public theremin performance in the year of his death, at age 97
Live footage of me reblogging this bad boy
