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Did you know the original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato? Did you know that all tequila's are miskell, but not all mesoscale? There's tequila. Did you know some goats climb trees? Did you know there really was a Jones family that everyone in New York was trying to keep up with or that Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy who could draw before he could talk? You will stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things become the most interesting person you know.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles would be Chuck Berry and there's Jerry out there. And this is stuff you should know that was pretty good.

There an impression that you think, hey, not bad.

I am a little bit proud of myself because the Thurmond, it turns out, is very, very tough to play and it's even tougher to imitate. So that was something of an accomplishment for me. Have you ever tried to play one? No, I haven't.

I have not.

No. It's weird that you had to think about that. Well, I mean, I was just trying to think, like, I think there's one in the HowStuffWorks office somewhere or the Real Stuff podcast. I want to say that there is. Well, I'm there, man.

Let's go get it. OK, so look around. We'll wait. We'll wait. We will edit out you going and wandering around and looking for.

I'll just talk to the people that keep them busy.

That's where I mean, I'm obviously not going to go look for it, but I had no idea that was one here.

I think so I could be making that up. But doesn't it seem like the kind of thing that would be there? Oh, totally. So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about Theravance. And if you still don't know what we're talking about, let us describe this.

We should play a clip, too. We'll be able to do that, right?

Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. Well, here you go. We'll play a clip of something that will figure out what it is later. Ready?

Yeah. So there's whatever we selected post-production to put into to demonstrate their but that that eerie HIGH-PITCHED kind of wailing sound that Sitharaman and the Therman was the world's first electronic musical instrument. And it was created by accident, as we'll see. But it uses electromagnetism, actually electromagnetic interference, to produce a changing pitched sound, changing in pitch and changing in volume. And you can create this this sound, this music, I guess you would call it, without any kind of mechanical energy whatsoever.

You're just moving your your body or your hands in and out of the electromagnetic field around the thurmon. And that's what produces the sound. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. And as we will also see, it's it's key that you use a hand because your body, it has to be something that conducts electricity like you could technically could use metal or something like that. But you wouldn't have the nuance that you able to achieve by, you know, very sort of micro movements in your hand and your fingers. Right. And when you're playing it, it sort of looks like almost like you're conducting an orchestra the way you hold your hand.

It's very evocative of conducting, I think and it's funny you say that because Thurmon, who is actually named Terman, he he said that it was like creating music out of thin air, just like a conductor does. So that was very astute of you, Charles.

Thank you. So, yeah, you mentioned Termine. This guy has his Russian name, I guess was Leav Sergei UVic Termine to RMN.

I guess Leon Thiermann sounds a little more Western. Did he change it?

I don't know. You know, here in America, we just change it for you, you know? Right. You come through Ellis Island, you get basically a whole new name that Americans can pronounce more easily. I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

That's a good point. So when Lev was in his early 20s, in the sort of early 1910, 1919 ish, he was working at the Physical Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and he was working. And as you'll see, he he, you know, for a majority of his career worked for the Russian state. But he was working on an invention that was supposed to measure the density of gas in the chamber. And essentially, he was trying to develop like a land based sonar device that used electromagnetism to detect objects that came within a certain area.

And he was like, hey, I'm a pretty young, hip, creative guy. I wonder if I had the sound to this thing and not intending to create anything musical. But just let me add sound to it to indicate that this thing is even on. And he did it. And bada bing ba boom. Bon Jovi, it was like, that sounds pretty cool.

Yeah. Because I mean, like it would make sense that you want to add sound to because if you're detecting something coming within proximity, it's kind of like metal detectors. You get closer and closer to the metal. That sound that it makes increases. It's basically the exact same thing, except you're not detecting metal. You're detecting electromagnetic interference basically with the theremin. But because he was young hip guy, like you said, and also a classically trained cellist, he said, I think that I could turn this into a musical instrument.

And he did pretty quickly. He fiddled with it a little bit, maybe a little little, put another doohickey or two on there. And all of a sudden he had, like I said at the beginning, the world's first electronic musical instrument. Like if you're into dance music or electronica or anything like that, you a great debt of gratitude to to leave Termine. Sure. Should we use some of these things that you found, some of these descriptors?

Yeah. So this this initially had like two or three. And I just started adding to one of my favorite things to do is to go around collecting people's hapless descriptions of what a theremin sounds like because nobody nails it. But all all of them come close and they're hilarious in their attempts.

Yeah. So here's one, a cross between a violin and a soprano voice. That's that's not bad. I think that was the original one. Yeah. I mean, you can get I mean, especially when you get some vibrato going, you can see how one might liken it to a voice. Oh yeah. It doesn't sound like a voice to me, but I get the I get the cop.

OK, how about this one, a purified and magnified saxophone. No, I think if there was ever a complete failure in describing a Thurmon sound, it's that one.

Yeah, it sounds like a saxophone, like a cheap keyboard. The saxophone button on a cheap keyboard. Sounds like a sexy. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe that's what they might not be totally missing their point.

Let me see the howling of a horn. Did wind, that's pretty good. I love that one, this one, I think comes from Thurmon himself, a cello lost in a dense fog and crying because it does not know how to get home for cello, just walking around in the dark by himself.

Whoa. Oh, how do I get home?

Let me see here. A cross between an amplified child slide whistle. So it doesn't say. And what that was a that was a mistake.

I put or one side whistle and a human voice and the squawks that emanated from early radio speakers. That was pretty, that was pretty good because it's the one of the key components of a Thurmon is that slide, because it is, as you will see. And if you listen to their music, it's all about that slide. It's not they're not punctuated with staccato notes.

No. And as a matter of fact, I was watching tutorial by currently the world's foremost theremin. I believe her name is Carolina Ek Aebi, C.K. she's German. So however you pronounce that in German and she makes finger motions to cut off the last motion to to create a space in between notes, separate notes, rather than she uses the technical jargon for what she's talking about. I'm not quite familiar with it, but another way to put it is she's cutting spaces into the notes, so she's not sliding it around like a trombone.

No, or slide whistle that's lost in the dark.

You do a pretty good sight also dear slide whistle. You add one of those when I was a kid. What's the best thing ever? I never even did. I'm self-taught.

Oh boy. I know what you're getting for Christmas. Oh, nice. I remember that time you got me an empty can of beer. Oh yeah, that's right man. That was one hundred years ago or.

No, it wasn't Billy Beer. I'm sorry. It was just plain generic beer. Oh, I can with just the black like Helvetica father just as beer.

Yeah. My friend ate his favorite beer of all time. Has he actually drank it. Yeah.

When we went to there were like four of us that went to L.A. for spring break in college and stayed with my brother and we went to the store and they had the generic beer and Teddy is a beer guy and he just flipped about like three cases of it. Wow. For fifty fifty cents. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So Thurman has got this instrument going. He's pretty proud of it. Word gets around Mother Russia and word gets to Lenin, who at the time was chairman of Russia's sort of newlines. I guess installed is one word for it, the Bolshevik government and he flipped over it. Lenin was a Thurmon nut and he was like, you know what, I'm going to send you on tour, comrade. And this thing is going to want people to champion electricity as a whole just by these demonstrations.

Right.

Just so that they can possibly get a thiamine themselves. They're going to install electricity in their house. That's my plan. Umland, forget reading lights or warmth, right? It's the thiamin that they'll want. So he tours Russia for a while, basically promoting, you know, electricity, electronic music, Soviet know how that kind of stuff. And his tour is so successful that they said Narbonne to Western Europe and he toured Western Europe with what were known as his eather concerts, ether wave concerts, not either concerts.

Those are totally different. Yeah. And the one of the lesser known things about Letterman is that while he was touring Europe, just wowing crowds, he was also spying for the Soviet state, which he did for a while, actually.

Yeah, I know this. I say this a lot, but this this has got the makings of a pretty good movie, too, don't you think? Sure. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm not quite sure you'd have to really be a master. Ta ta ta, pull out the the humanity and the compassion in the viewer for this guy because he is morally ambiguous in a lot of places, I think. But in the end, you know, just the kind of treatment he got, I think kind of makes him a sad, sad case that you'll do a lot of treatment, feel bad for.

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll get to that. But so he's touring around. He, like you said, as a spy for the Soviet regime. And because of this tour, he's being allowed. He's getting all this access to places where he can be a pretty good spy, actually, Pat, offense's and like industrial complexes and stuff like that. So he's getting access and doing a pretty good job spying for for the Soviet regime.

And he ended up taking up residence in the United States. I didn't see whether that was part of the Soviet plan or his own plan. I'm not sure. But he he found himself quite at home and in New York when he he showed up in the U.S. and started becoming kind of the toast of the town. I read that Albert Einstein kept a lab at Truman's apartment in New York. I'm Fifty Fourth Street. When he visited him, he would just do some work.

While he was there, he became pretty well known, especially among like avant garde musicians and composers. He was just kind of a known as like a cool guy. He had a very scandalous marriage in that he married an African-American prima ballerina whose name is Lavinia Williams. And I think he lived in the United States for a good decade. He showed up in 1928 and he lived there until 1938, I believe. And along the way, because he became such a toast of the town and his his theremin, which had been known for a while, is is Thurmon Vox.

Yeah. Which is Thurman's voice finally got shortened. And there have been an RCA said, you know what, I think these things are going to be a hit. We're going to we're going to buy the rights from you or at least lease the rights from you and start producing our own.

Yeah, because he obviously was wise enough to get a patent in the US in nineteen twenty eight. That was his second wife by the way. I didn't, I couldn't get a whole lot about his first wife other than it was clearly in Russia because her name was Ekatarina Pavlovna. OK, it's a pretty Russian name and he was married three times.

He had a couple of daughters I think with his third wife and I'll talk a little bit more about his kids later. But he he gets this patent RCA, like he said, jumps on board the Thurmon bandwagon and manufactures a a version of the thare like an at home Thurmon for one hundred and seventy five bucks, which is a really expensive musical instrument. That's twenty seven hundred bucks today, especially during the Depression. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I don't know who they thought they were going to sell them to ask if they were going to sell them to everybody.

Yeah. RCA made it sound like they, they were on to something really, really big, but it was such a expensive price point. It was such a niche product I think. I mean they sold the first run that they built, but only to like rich people who want to do like throw parties.

And while people with their theremin, basically, I guess one of the other big problems with it is that they marketed it like there's no strings, there's no frets, there's no you know, there's nothing that was there, no strings attached.

Yeah. Basically, they said that anybody can learn to play this, make music with the wave of the hand. And the problem is the Thurmon is really, really hard to learn because it doesn't have things like frets or strings or chord progressions or anything like that. And there's no other instrument like it on the planet. So it's very difficult to learn. And I think RCA made a first production run of like 400 units and they managed to sell three hundred and eighty of them, some of which are still in existence today.

And I was looking them up. Apparently, if you can find one that's just in terrible shape, you could still probably get 3500 bucks for it and one that's in really good condition. Mint condition would be about thirteen grand because they're such collector's items, but also because of the original the electronics inside the circuitry. Yeah, that that it makes a sound that's really difficult to replicate because we have such an embarrassment of riches with advancement in electronics today that it's hard to make something sound old timey and original, you know what I mean?

Everything sounds so rich and advanced. So I think that's one of the reasons why people will pay thirteen grand for an original RCA and a bit Jack White has won.

Yeah, I'll bet he does too. So when he was in the United States. Living there, doing some spying and doing some therapy and playing like he would put on big, big concerts, he put on a full Thurmon orchestra, which is to say, I think there were like six of them at Carnegie Hall. So like these were big, big events. And like you said, he got married to his second wife there and was leading this double life really like no one knew what was going on, obviously, as a spy.

And he got a little more and more nervous is World War Two approaches that he might get ratted out. He's he's really enjoying this life in America. And he's like, I don't want to I don't want to do this. The FBI's got a file on me. He didn't say that because he didn't know that. But the ghost of Leon Thiermann said that later on. Right. And he was getting pretty deep into debt. And so in nineteen thirty eight, he left the U.S. after ten years there, didn't even tell his wife he was leaving his second wife and stayed gone until the early 90s.

Yeah, I'm part of that was not by his own decision. Like he stayed gone in part because. Sure, as Stalin came into power, he was not very he didn't fancy the old regime. And Thurman was definitely associated with that old regime. He was a favorite of Lenin's. So he was thrown into the gulag as the USSR really started to gain strength and power. And apparently, as World War Two started to approach, the Soviets realized that they'd actually thrown a lot of valuable scientists in their minds into gulags.

So they went and got them out, including Letterman, and put them in a different kind of gulag called the Shorrosh.

Yeah, yeah, I got it. Charanga, which is basically like a prison for scientists like science camp that you can't leave. Exactly. And you can't see your family or friends or connect with the outside world. But you can spend all of your time thinking about ways to come up with new devices that the Soviet state can use. And that is actually where Letterman Thurman came up with his other great invention that he's known for, which is called The Thing or the great SEAL bug.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty good time to take a break.

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Hey guys, this is Ashlei with the almost famous podcast. We had such a fun episode this week, thanks to Occy Clean with some of your favorites from Bachelor Nation, like Caitlin Bristo, Chris Harrison, Nick BIOL. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with a man who started.

What are you looking forward to for Christmas? Like what kind of gifts are just things that you want to do during the Christmas holiday? And what are the girls looking forward to? Yeah.

Yeah, the girls want it's so funny because this is the first year that, like, their Christmas list is in like a novel. They don't really want anything this year.

And I don't know, I think we're just looking forward to spending time with family. We've been watching Christmas movies.

It's like before Halloween. So we love doing that.

Yeah, it's kind of it feels different this year. It's very low key, but we're enjoying it.

We love her so much and big. Thanks and for making this happen. Make sure to stock up on your oxy clean so you have something to help clean up those red wine stains you're bound to get over Christmas, get your oxy clean, work your magic.

OK, Chuck, so frankly, you really left everybody hanging with that last thing, so let's talk about the thing or the great seal, Bob, OK?

Uh, yeah, boy, all these years in I got to teach you about a cliffhanger.

Yeah, I like to I like to plot along at the most boring pace and stop at the most boring, predictable times.

So before the thing he invented something called a barren borin and that was at least another listening device that sort of functioned as a laser microphone that you would use today where you would point it at a at a piece of glass like someone's, you know, behind that glass talking. And it would sense the vibrations in the glass that, wow, he invented that.

Yeah, he invented the Barun. I've heard about that thing, but that was nothing sort of as far as impact goes compared to the great seal bug or the thing like you mentioned. And this was really pretty extraordinary that this actually worked, not that his invention worked, but the scam worked. So what he did was he put a passive bug inside a woodcarving of the seal, the great seal of the United States. They presented it to Admiral Hare Harriman, who was the American ambassador to Moscow, and he hung it on his wall and it allowed himself to get spied on for years.

So so in Harriman's defense, it was like you said, it was like you said, he was a very trusting sort, which made him a terrible choice for the ambassador, the American ambassador in Moscow. But it was a passive bug. It didn't use electricity. So there is no possible way for anybody to sweep for it. So I'm sure they swept this great seal. Oh, yeah. You know, eight ways from Sunday and turn nothing up.

And they're like, all right, put it up. And the reason it was passed was because it didn't use electricity and it was activated by microwaves.

The microwaves would turn an antenna on and you could be a few doors down and just beam like a microwave beam toward this thing. And it would activate the antenna. And then the place that it was put in, the Eagles beak created kind of like an ear, a wooden ear that amplified the sound in the room and the antenna would pick it up and transmit it automatically.

Seven years they were able to spy on these conversations. And it was it could have gone on forever. But it was it was discovered by accident. There was a British radio operator who picked up the signal and was like, hey, something's going on here. And I guess they eventually, you know, probably just tore that room inside out until they found it would be my guess.

Right. That radio operator is that is that everywhere?

I know that voice. The great the best part of that story is that they got the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts, the young pioneers. Yeah. To present the plaque. And I was raised as a child of the Cold War. So I strongly suspect the young pioneers were in on it. They knew full well what they were doing. Of course, communists.

Yeah, they were in on it. It was a young Vladimir Putin. Probably, probably Chuck.

You never know. So Thurman was he kind of disappeared from public view because of the the gulag experience and being in science prison camp. And then 1967, a New York Times critic named Harold Schoenberg found him quite by accident at the Moscow Conservatory where he was working at the time. He was writing a story. I wrote a story that basically kind of out of him and said, hey, here's Leon Thiermann. He's right here in the Soviet Union.

Yeah. And he was probably like, finally, I've been waiting for you guys to dig me up. But the Soviet state said, you know what, this is not a good thing. We can't have this guy talking to the press and becoming a cause celeb. Again, he's just done too much dirt. He's been in a gulag before. He bugged the ambassador like this. He just knows too much. We don't want them people paying attention to him.

So they ruined him. They ruined his career. They had him fired from the conservatory. They trashed all of the inventions he was working on. And he ended up spending the next couple of decades living in poverty in a group home, in a room, in a group home, basically because of that New York Times critic finding him and writing that article again, which is sad on the one hand. But at the other hand on the other hand, it brought him back from any sort of obscurity he'd kind of been pounded into.

Yeah. So this lasts until about the eighties when the Soviet Union opens up just a bit and he leaves and goes to Europe. He goes to the US, like we said at the beginning in 1991, and then was able to sort of reap a little bit of his reward as a as a, you know, pioneer in electronic music or music, period. There's a documentary called Theremin Colen An Electronic Odyssey from the early 90s. That is not great, but it does feature him in the end, which is which is pretty cool, like the last third of it has actual interviews with Leon Thurmon and him playing it and stuff like that.

Sure.

I mean, he must have known that he needed to shore up his legacy while he could because, you know, he visited the U.S. in 1991 and he was dead two years later back in Russia. And he was still working on stuff to the end. He was working on a dance floor that was made up of his Turpie stone, which is another invention of his, which was like a thurmon. But rather than using your hands, he used your whole body and you danced while he was making an entire dance floor.

Out of this, you could have a bunch of people dancing, making the worst possible sounds you can imagine all at the same time.

And he was in his 90s. Yeah, he was like 1997 when he died. So, yeah, he was working on this in his 90s. So he was a hepcat until the end.

So while he was gone, something happened in the U.S. in the 1940s and 50s. The Thurmon kind of blew up and blew up. As far as the Thurmon goes, it wasn't like it became a staple in music or a staple in pop music, but it was used largely at first in movies, science fiction, the Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, most notably maybe the Lost Weekend. And yeah, it unless it was science fiction, it sort of came to be a signal for psychological distress.

Like if somebody was under the influence of drugs or if that was somebody like locked away in a in a what they would have called an insane asylum back then, you might hear a Thurmon kind of say, by the way, this character's off their rocker. You're right.

If you if your drug trip feels to you like a Thurmon sounds, you're on a bad trip, buddy.

You think you're all right. But you can you could trace the kind of the breakout popularity or at least the introduction to the general public of the Thurmon to basically two people back in the 40s and 50s. Miklós Rossia, who was the guy who scored the lost weekend and Spellbound, and Samuel Hoffman, who was the thermogenesis and composer who worked with some other kind of more popular composers, Les Baxter and Harry Revel, to make some really great music in a couple of new new types of music, lounge and exotica.

It's right up your alley.

I listen to music out of the moon today like eight times. I listen to perfume's set to music. How is it? It's OK. Not as much there Theremin is. I wanted I wanted more.

Thiermann Well a little Thurmon goes a long way for sure. Well yeah that's true. But there are parts in music out of the Munmorah you have to like really listen because it just it merges so well harmonises so with the other stuff like maybe vocalists harmonizing the terminal, harmonize with it, which is now that I know about Thurman's, that is incredibly masterful to be able to harmonize with the human voice using a tharman. Yeah, totally.

But those two guys definitely kind of introduced that to the to the public.

And one member of the public that got introduced to Thurman, who is really responsible for breaking it out, was a guy named Robert Moog Mode might recognize whatever you might recognize from his synthesizer that he was the guy who invented the synthesizer. Well, apparently, Robert Moag. Yeah, his first and last love I saw someone say was the theremin.

Yeah. He got together with his dad and he built theremin kits to sell to people. It's kind of one of the cool thing about Thurmon. You can buy one ready to go. But all along since the beginning and up to this very day, you can buy a kit to kind of build it yourself, because they're very they very much cater to circuitry and electronic wonks who love to get in there with their soldering iron and mess around. So kits were very popular from the beginning, and that's kind of how Moe got it started as a company.

Yeah, by selling these Thurmon kits. And I think it was 1954 when he started selling them. And by the 60s they were like really ready to be used. They were you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of room in psychedelic music for the firemen. And so it pops up on some Rolling Stones albums, apparently. Brian Jones, right? Yeah. Brian Jones played the Thurmon for a couple of albums. It's on a whole lot of love, or Robert Plant has his climax.

And then don't tell me that's meant to represent anything else, but that everybody knows that I know that's his fourth career. Could you imagine? It's like if you were, you know, having sex with Robert Plant in the 1970s and and that's literally what he started doing. Jimmy Page is comes out of the closet playing the chairman of the company. Oh, my lord, that be great. There's a couple of places where you'd think it pops up, but you would be wrong, Chuck.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's, uh, well, it's not controversial. The Beach Boys song Good Vibrations is probably the most popular song ever to really heavily feature very distinctly what you think is a theremin. It's actually something called an electric theremin. Brian Wilson calls it a theremin. Everyone sort of calls it a theremin. But it's a trombonist named Paul Turner invented it. Basically a very simplified theremin that you could play with knobs to make it easier to hit the right tones.

That that to me, makes it not a theremin. Yeah, it's an electric theremin.

So there is not a theremin on Good Vibrations is a lot of people think it's also not a Thurmon. You're hearing in the Star Trek theme. A lot of people apparently think that it shows up in that theme. And that, it turns out, is soprano Luly Jean Norman hitting all those incredible notes. I don't even I don't think I've ever heard that theme. Oh, OK.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was Beaker, apparently. I just made a cameo in that and that version me. Yeah.

So those are two places the Thurmon doesn't show up, it does show up elsewhere in movies like Ed Wood and Mars attacks both I think Tim Burton movies.

Right, yeah, but he's all over the Thiermann Hellboy. It was also in First Man, which I have still not seen. But I guess there's a scene where Neil Armstrong throws his his young dead daughter's bracelet into a crater in the moon and they use Thiermann, which seems like a very bold choice for a recent movie to me. I'm surprised you haven't seen that. I'm a little surprised, too. Well, they seemed as well. I'm surprised I haven't seen it because I have a crush on Gossling who doesn't, you know, man, Lars and the real girl is just one of the best movies ever made.

Yeah. Also starring a friend of life. You should know Paul Schneider.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right. That's great.

So a bunch of, you know, pop music really latched on to it. And and the 90s and 2000s group called The Silver Apples used one. One of my favorite records from the 90s is a band called Mercury Rev and their album Deserter Songs heavily features that theremin in a couple of their songs.

There's a simple Turo song that has the Thurmon, and it's played by Jason Newsted, who is the basis of Metallica at the time. There's a trivia answer for you.

Seriously, it's like you can't grab the Thurmon. It changes the pitch.

There's also that is your Jason Newsted impression.

Sure. I guess he just looks angry, doesn't he? That's HETFIELD. You're thinking of how Newstead always had that frown? Oh, well, all of them did, really. They were metal, don't you know? And then there was a band called Lothar in the Han People. And Lothar was the name of the Thurmon who the band considered the lead singer in the hand. People were the people playing Lothar that they.

Yeah. That annoyed me so much. I didn't even look it up to listen. Oh, really?

I think it's awesome really. It's just so sixty's to me. I love it. I think it's Twins' trying to be 60s. No but they're from the 60s. Oh they are. Yeah yeah. Yeah. Okay I'll look into it then.

I mean have you seen how well what was the name of that band that they just beat up like appliances. I think they're Swedish and they, they made the rounds, they were like kind of viral like several years back. And they did like a total eclipse of the heart cover. But beating up an oven and a dishwasher.

Oh, my God. You'd actually like a really pretty great one guy. He's like, so scrawny that he can't keep his pants up so his pants keep falling down every time he hits the stove with the sledgehammer, it's like I mean, it's the stove with his belt.

Yeah. Basically put the belt on. The guy needs a belt more. I don't even think a belt could service him any longer. I think he needs like an extension cord length. He's got a tight as tight as he possibly can. He's thin.

And you just unknowingly made another music reference. Well, what the great, great band, Silver Jews from the late, great Dave Berman.

He has a line and one of their great songs is a great holding up your trousers with extension cords. Well, that's funny. I wonder if he's when are they from the 90s, 2000s and also featuring friend of the show, Bob Danovitch. Yeah, no, I knew that. It's basically pavement, isn't it, now?

It was Dave Berman, but Malkmus is on the one. Great, great. I mean, they're all good albums, but it's a great American Water is one of the best albums of that decade.

I wonder if he was making a Cypresses reference, because that's what I was making reference to. I think Nelson Months has a he uses an extension cord for a belt. Oh, really? Yeah, he's neglected. I knew this is going to take us down the musical side roads. Sure. And I knew you were going to mention Robert Plant climaxing because you say that like every other week. I can't stop talking about it, so we take another break, I think so, and then we're going to come back and explain how Thurman works and then how to play it.

Booya how's that for a cliffhanger?

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OK, Chuck, so a thurmon works through electronic magic, basically, I think we should just leave it at that and we could.

No, we can't. I really went to a lot of trouble to try to figure out how these things worked in the most simplistic terms possible, and that's really saying something, because the people who write about how Thurmond's work are the people who build Thurmond's, which means the people who understand things like amplitude and currents and electromagnetic interference and all of that stuff. Yeah, basically, you've got two different circuits. You've got a pitch circuit and a volume circuit.

And if you've ever seen a ferrymen, it's basically like a box. And if you're standing at the box getting ready to play it on your right, the player's right. Is it a single antenna going up vertically that looks like one of a pair of rabbit ears that you would use in an old timey TV antenna? Look it up, kids. And then on the other side, the left, there's like a round metal, horizontally oriented antenna that comes out the other side of the box, the one on the left, the round one that's for adjusting volume, the one on the right, the vertical rod is for adjusting the pitch.

Yeah, it's sort of volume attack and attack is one of those words that unless you're sort of into playing music, you don't know what it means, but you'll see it pop up on various instruments labeled attack. And that's their sort of it's called the musical envelope, the four stages of sound. And it starts with attack. That's sort of the beginning of the sound like, right, when you strike a piano key or right when you pluck a guitar string and then it goes from attack to decay, to sustain, to release and the volume and attack, it's not quite the same thing.

But as far as what we need to know about the theremin, that right. I'm sorry, the horizontal one controls volume.

Initech, OK, and then the one on the right, the upright one, it controls pitch and the way that it produces pitches, it's got two different oscillators in there. And Australia is just something that produces alternating current electricity in waveform. Right. It produces waves. And one of those oscillators produces one at a static frequency. It's always the same frequency no matter what the other one adjusts. And so when you get your hand, oh, we left out a really important thing.

The the way this whole thing works is because you live human person are holding an electric charge right now.

We talk and so are we did.

OK, so that's called your capitán. Yeah. And when you're capitalist's your electric charge, whatever that may be, and it's going to be different for each person. So I think kind of the implication, Chuck, is that every different person who walks up to a particular Thurmon is going to produce a different sound. Didn't that seem right? Oh, I don't know. I never really thought about that.

I would think so, because I wouldn't think we're all walking around at the same carpets, although I could be wrong. But regardless, just if that's wrong, totally disregard what I just said. The point is, is that when your your electrical charge presented in the form of your hand interferes with the the the oscillating current that's being created in generated and run through this antenna, it changes their oscillating frequency. And so these two things subtract or add together their frequencies to produce this sound that raises or lowers and pitch.

Depending on how close you are. The closer you get, the higher the pitch, the further away the lower the pitch. And that's basically how it works. The same thing basically with your with your left hand, with the volume or attack. That's it. You're just basically interfering with the electric electromagnetic fields produced and carried through these antennas using your own electrical charge. That's how they work. Yeah.

And it's if you watch the documentary, there's one scientist that attaches it to a waveform visualizer, sort of explain it a little better. And he not better than we did, but just more in more detail and say, no, no, no.

And he he was just said it's remarkable that that Leon Theremin or Termine invented this thing without the use of one of those, like he was going completely by ear.

And I think had it not been for his training as a cellist, it may not have ever even been anything because you have to have a really and this sort of segues into actually playing the thing. Right. You have to have really, really good ear for pitch to play a theremin, because like you said earlier, there are no markers like Freda's to look at to know where to go to hit a gee. It's got a yeah, four and a half.

I saw a four and a half octave range and also saw five and a half. But you got to know in the air surrounding you in space where exactly to put your hand to get the tone that you want and if it's off a little bit, it's not going to sound right. So the learning curve. Is long, it's a tough instrument to really get good at, extremely so. Yeah, because, I mean, if you if you know how to play a guitar, you can walk up to a guitar and be like, oh, here's the frets or whatever.

I can put my fingers here, here and I'm going to make the sound with the Thurmon. It's it's literally different places in the air. And so yeah, you do have to have a good ear. One of the other things you have to have that's essential to playing that theremin is a steady hand. Yeah. Or I guess not necessarily, but it definitely helps because if you see somebody kind of moving around, like there's just totally whacked out or whatever, playing a thurmon with the sounds you're making is not what it's supposed to sound like.

Theremin is played very delicately. There's a very famous theremin is named Clara Rockeymoore, who said you play with you play a thurmon with butterfly wings. Yeah. And she's basically saying, like, your fingers are supposed to be delicate and controlled like a butterfly wings. And so if you watch people playing theremin, they're they're just like they're standing totally straight and still it's just their hands and their wrists basically that are moving and making these really delicate motions through the air that is producing all of these different sounds.

Yeah, and the reason you have to stand still, obviously, is because any movement of your body is going to affect the sound. That's why I made the Jason Newstead joke in that documentary. There's an old I don't know who she was.

It might have been Claire Rockmore, maybe probably was Claire Iraq or Lucy Bigelow Rosen maybe, but she was like back off in her accent. And she was like, I'm not you know, I'm trying to be nice about it, but you can't you can't come any closer. And I tell the first violinist in an orchestra the same thing. Like, you have to have space around the instrument itself or else it's going to affect the sound.

Right. Hey, you know who else played the Thurmon who's a Thurmon master to my friend Toby. Really? Yes.

So he's a cool guy. He is very cool. He was from Dallas in The Polyphonic Spree, is from Dallas, like half of Dallas as members of the Purifying Spree, except for poor Toby. And so he went to the dude from Tripping J's D. I can't remember his name, but the leader of The Polyphonic Spree, you know, I want to join what what what instrument do you need? And the guy was like, Oh, I want you go learn to play Thiermann and come back.

It's so Toby went and taught himself Thiermann and came back and joined The Polyphonic Spree. That's right. I think it's Tim something or other. Yeah. I was into them for those first two albums quite a bit. Oh man. They were so great. What, what great music. Because there was so earnest too. You know, they weren't being ironic.

That was this kid, not like some sharp guy and that band of hippies whose he Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, you know, it was the same kind of deal like, hey, let's get forty people in a band and not have one bar soap between us. No, never heard of you know, they had one big hit that you had.

No. What? Oh, that home, won't you come home? Home is where I really want to be.

I mean, I wasn't into it and it was a huge, huge hit. So was that Judy Garland?

Oh, boy. So, yeah. So Toby Toby is the the greatest theremin player I've ever met. That's awesome.

So, you know, you play like we said with that, you know, a lot of times, like I said, it looks like you're holding a little, whatever you call it, the conductor's. I want to do a show on conducting, by the way, just to learn what that thing is, the little sticky, the stick. But it looks like you're sort of holding that because a lot of theremin players tend to touch their thumb in their forefinger together.

And you're you know, you're sort of wiggling your fingers for vibrato and you can learn basic theremin and make the sounds that sound good. And then there's like a next level pheromone where you really get involved with your fingers and very subtle movements to create different sounds.

Yeah. So it is like a really difficult thing to do and to learn to play in no small part because there aren't frets or anything like that, but also because of the just precision movement of your fingers and and hands. And you also can't really get into the music either. You have to stay still because if you sway or, you know, swing your head left or right or anything like that, you're going to mess with that. That part of your body is going to come into the electromagnetic field and you're going to mess up the sound of the music.

That's right. And that's why hip hop concerts, they say throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care except for the theremin. That's right. Very big.

Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't play fair. I think we should decide at this point out.

I very well may be very surprised if that ends up in the final cut. One thing we didn't mention that seems obvious, unless you know about musical instruments or might seem obvious. I don't know what I'm saying. It's obvious to me. But it's going through an amplifier, like if you're sitting at home, like, yeah, but how does the sound come out? It's an electronic instrument. So it's plugged into an amp.

It is it actually that volume circuit that you're interfering with, you're actually changing the voltage, I believe, of the amplifier. That's how when you move your hand closer and further away, you're affecting the voltage that's that's released by that, that whatever Transformers is supplying the amplifier with the electricity.

Yeah. Like you can get a Thurmond for not a lot of money or a Thurmon kit or I would say get a one of those.

And if there are many, is that Moag is building. Yeah. Because those are just super, super cool and they sound amazing and they make it a little bit easier on you.

Yeah. Because they, they, they recognize chords. Right. So when you move your hand like through the air at a certain way, it like it goes through the chromatic scales. It's not, it's not just random stuff. It actually kind of is like a very forgiving and corrective of what you're doing. It figures out what you're trying to do and that makes it sound like like you want it to. But the most amazing thing is there is a dial where you can dial back that level of forgiveness.

As you get better and better at playing the Ferrymen, you can just make it so that it's not doing that for you at all and you have to do it yourself, which is pretty awesome. Yeah.

And it also sounds Cynthy and cool. Yeah. I mean, I like the sound of a regular theremin, but that there are many I had never heard of it until today and I was like I might have to get one of those at some point.

All right. It's pretty cool if you're like a maker kind of person and you like music there, you've probably already made Theremins. But if not, check out a guy named Arthur Harrison's site, Ferrymen US. He sells kits and like has all sorts of articles and stuff like that. And then there's a guy named Ken Moore who hacked into like the Xbox Kinect and the Nintendo Wii and figured out how to turn them into Theremins. And there's one where he does like a, you know, really admirable attempt at the Star Trek theme using his we theremin.

Just look up Cam more we Thurmon Star Trek theme and thank me later.

It's a cool community, like I love circuitry in electronic gadgetry, wonk's. And those communities sort of like the hams, like they just really get into their shutting the door to their little room and working on very small, very difficult to understand projects and hacking stuff and creating new things. It's just really, really in the in the spirit of creation and invention, I think, in which it was always intended to be nice.

Yeah. I mean, the Thurmon is all that and then some chuck the whole bag of chips. You got anything else? Yeah, I sort of promised earlier a little bit of talk about Thurmond's legacy with his kids and grandkids, and he did have a daughter get a couple of daughters, but he had one name, Natasha Thiermann, from his third wife, who was a Thurmond master in Russia. And then 29. She's 72 now. And then 29 year old Peter Thurman, his great grandson is also a Russian composer and theremin master.

Pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Yeah, that's neat. Also that they just adopted the westernise version of their grandfather's name, too, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you got anything else? Nothing else. Well, before we go, Chuck, because it's that time of year in this episode, it's going to come out around you. His birthday. I want to take a second to say happy birthday to my dear sweet wife, Yuming.

Happy birthday, yams. Thanks.

Happy birthday to me. And since I said happy birthday, you mean connected to that means it's time for listener mail.

So this is a this is a listener mail from Richard Roberts. And this was just supremely heartwarming. Our book is out Stuff You Should Know Collin. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

Huge, huge thanks to everyone who pre bought it or bought it after its release, an audio book or or hardcover form. But the stuff you should know, Army pages just been lit up with people posting pictures of them with a book of them reading it, of their kids, reading it, of their dogs, eating it already. That's happened. And this comes from Richard Roberts from the Stuff U.S. Army. Hey, guys, thanks for doing what you do.

This podcast is wonderful. Just want to email you, let you know about a lovely gesture I just witnessed on the stuff, you know, Army Facebook page one member posted to say they didn't buy the book due to their financial constraints at the time, but that they were so excited that it popped up in a search at their local library. And before you know it, in the comments, there was a fellow, many fellow stuff, you know, Army fans scrambling to buy a book for this complete stranger so that she could have her own copy.

I think I took some screenshot or I took some screenshots, which I attached. I know you always do shout outs, but the philanthropic book buyers and the original poster might get a kick out of it if you did. And it's a nice story that people might enjoy. And that is Richard Roberts from Down Under and Jacko Du Bois is who stepped up first and is buying this book for this person and sending a book to this person. So that's all jako.

Send us an email and we'll send you something nice. Don't know what it is yet, but just send us an email jako and we want to pay it forward right back to you.

That's a lovely idea, Chuck. Very nice. Thanks, Geko, and thank you. That was Richard that wrote in. That was Richard. Thank you to Richard. If you want to call out a very nice example of paying it forward or a random act of kindness or anything like that, we'd love hearing about that stuff. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast that I heart, radio dotcom. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?

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