Joseph Lazarevich Poliakoff (Russian: Ио́сиф Ла́заревич Поляко́в; 24 April 1873 – 24 November 1959) was a Ukrainian-born British telephone and sound engineer and inventor, particularly of hearing aids.[3]
Poliakoff was a Ukrainian who experienced first-hand the communist revolution in Russia from the family's Moscow flat across from the Kremlin.[4] Near starvation after the revolution, he was given a government job as a district telephone inspector from an admiring commissar and he helped build Moscow's first automatic telephone exchange.[4] He then fled with his family from the Soviet Union to the UK in 1924.[5][6]
Poliakoff was a renowned inventor of electrical devices[7] whose many inventions included a selenium photograph telephony shutter in 1899 (US patent 700,083, 13 May 1902),[8][9] which, along with electrical sound amplification, allowed for synchronized audio on film, the radio volume control, a magnetic induction loop that allowed hearing-impaired people to hear in auditoriums or theatres,[10][11] and the paging beeper.[12]
He also founded the Multitone Electric Company of London, England in 1931 that produced hearing aid devices,[13] with their most prestigious client being Winston Churchill.[12] Poliakoff was managing director until 1938.[3]
He married Flora Shabbat, a granddaughter of a textile millionaire.[14] His son, Alexander Poliakoff (1910–1996) was chairman of Multitone Electronics for over 40 years,[14] and his grandsons are the chemist Sir Martyn Poliakoff and the dramatist/director Stephen Poliakoff.
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