Leon Theremin's good vibrations

Synopsis When a flying saucer circled over Washington, D.C. in the classic 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still , it did so to music played on an electronic instrument known as the Theremin. Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1896. In 1927 he traveled to America, where he obtained a patent for an electronic instrument he called the…