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 aid A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Hearing aids are classified as medical devices in most countries, and regulated by the respective regulations. Small audio amplifiers su ...

s. Poliakoff was a Ukrainian who experienced first-hand the communist revolution in Russia from the family's Moscow flat across from the Kremlin. 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. He then fled with his family from the Soviet Union to the UK in 1924. Poliakoff was a renowned inventor of electrical devices whose many inventions included a selenium photograph telephony shutter in 1899 (US patent 700,083, 13 May 1902), 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, and the paging beeper. He also founded the Multitone Electric Company of London, England in 1931 that produced hearing aid devices, with their most prestigious client being

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...

. Poliakoff was managing director until 1938. He married Flora Shabbat, a granddaughter of a textile millionaire. His son,

Alexander Poliakoff Alexander Poliakoff (russian: Алекса́ндр Ио́сифович Поляко́в; 20 August 1910 – 26 July 1996) was a Russian Empire-born British electronics engineer, inventor and businessman, and the chairman of Multitone Electron ...

(1910–1996) was chairman of Multitone Electronics for over 40 years, and his grandsons are the chemist Sir

Martyn Poliakoff Sir Martyn Poliakoff (born 16 December 1947) is a British chemist, working on gaining insights into fundamental chemistry, and on developing environmentally acceptable processes and materials. The core themes of his work are supercritical fluid ...

and the dramatist/director

Stephen Poliakoff Stephen Poliakoff (born 1 December 1952) is a British playwright, director and screenwriter. In 2006 Gerard Gilbert of ''The Independent'' described him as the UK's "pre-eminent TV dramatist" who had "inherited Dennis Potter's crown". Early ...

References

1873 births 1959 deaths English people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent English people of Russian-Jewish descent Jews from the Russian Empire

Joseph Joseph is a common male given name, derived from the Hebrew Yosef (יוֹסֵף). "Joseph" is used, along with "Josef", mostly in English, French and partially German languages. This spelling is also found as a variant in the languages of the mo ...

Soviet emigrants to the United Kingdom Ukrainian Jews {{UK-scientist-stub