Moscow 4 August 1945. The European chapter of World War II was over and the United States and the Soviet Union were considering their future relationship.
At the American Embassy, a group of young men from the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union presented a gift as a symbol of friendship between the two world powers.
He presented a hand-made US seal to Averil Harriman, the then US ambassador to Russia. It was later referred to simply as ‘The Thing’.
Obviously, Harriman’s office would have searched this decorative piece of wood to see if there were any hidden devices installed in it, but no wires or batteries were found in it, so what harm could it do?
So Harriman displayed the object prominently on the wall of his study room, where it listened to his private conversations for the next seven years.
They could never have realized that this device was created by one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Leon Theremin.
He was best known for the revolutionary electric musical instrument named after him that could be played without touching it.
He lived in America with his wife Lavinia Williams but returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. His wife later revealed that Leon had been kidnapped. But anyway, he was immediately put to work in a prison camp where he was forced to design ‘The Thing’ along with other hearing devices.
Sometime later, American radio operators discovered that the American ambassador’s conversation was being broadcast over the airwaves. But the transmissions were quite unpredictable: when the embassy was searched to find out where the radio waves were coming from, no secret equipment was found. The search for this secret was going to take some more time.
The listening device of the Ambassador was inside ‘The Thing’. And it was a very simple antenna with a silver membrane over it to make a mic, and hidden in a little box. It had no batteries or other power source, as The Thing didn’t need one.
The device would be activated when Soviet scientists beamed radio waves towards the US embassy. It receives energy from the signals coming towards it and broadcasts the conversation back. This device would also be silenced when the Soviet signal was turned off.
Like the Theremin’s mysterious musical instrument, The Thing may appear to be a technological puzzle, but the concept of a device that is activated by radio signals sent back to it is far more expansive.
In the age of modern technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are being used almost everywhere.
I also have a tag in my passport, and a similar tag in my credit card that allows payments to be made by swiping at an RFID reader.
Library books also often have tags, while airlines often use them to track passenger luggage and stores to protect against theft.
Some of them have a current source, but like the Theremin instrument, most of them are powered by a radio signal coming their way. This reduces their cost and the low cost is the reason for their popularity.
A form of RFID was used by Allied aircraft during World War II. When the radar beamed at an aircraft, a device called a transponder would send a signal back to the radar that said, ‘We’re your friends, don’t shoot us down.’
But as silicon-based circuits began to shrink in size, so did the idea of tags that you could put on anything less expensive than an airplane.
Like barcodes, RFID tags can be used to instantly identify an object.
But unlike barcodes, they can be scanned automatically and don’t need to be aligned to a specific light. Some tags can be read from several feet away, some can be read with errors but also in collections.
And they can store more than just a barcode, allowing not only to identify an item, but also where and on what day that particular item was stored. was prepared.
RFID tags were also used in the 1970s to track railroad boxes and livestock.
But by the early 2000s, Tesco, Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense began requiring their suppliers to affix tags to the goods they supplied. As a result, RFID tags started appearing everywhere.
Some enthusiasts have even implanted RFID tags in their bodies, making it easier for them to open doors or board subways with just a wave of their hands.
In 1999, Kevin Ashton, who worked at home appliance maker Procter & Gamble, coined a new term for all the excitement surrounding RFID. He said that RFID will eventually lead us to the Internet of Things (IoT), a world in which everything will be connected to everything else.
But soon all the excitement about RFID turned to flashy products, including smartphones introduced in 2007, smartwatches, smart thermostats, smart speakers and even smart cars.
All these products are modern, have enormous computing power, but they are also expensive and require a lot of energy.
When we talk about the Internet of Things today, we don’t talk about RFID, but about these devices. It will be a world of such complex engineering that your toaster will be connected to your fridge without needing to, while remote controlled sex toys will also have information about your habits that we consider highly personal.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to live in an era of what sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, or ‘spy capitalism’. Monitoring people’s personal lives is a popular business model these days.
But amidst all the excitement and worry, RFID is quietly going about its business and I bet its heyday is still ahead.
Ashton’s vision for the Internet of Things was simple: computers would need data if they were to make sense of the real world, not just the electronic world.
Humans have better things to do than work with this data, so things will be created that feed the information to computers themselves, making the real world more understandable in a digital sense.
Many people have smartphones now, but things don’t. RFID can be a low-cost way to track these things.
If most tags just said ‘I’m here!’ to a passing RFID reader, that would be enough for computers to learn about the real world.
Tags can open doors, track tools, equipment and even drugs, automate production, and expedite small payments.
RFID may not have the power and flexibility of a smart watch or a self-driving car, but it is a low-cost and small technology, so low-cost and small enough that it can be used to tag hundreds of billions of objects.
And it won’t even need batteries. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t matter should re-read Leon Therriman.