JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
- This puts me in mind of an early and very popular post on this blog, on the constructed of a Fake Paris to fool bombers at night: A Paris Made to be Destroyed–Sham Paris, 1917/18
The use of aircraft in bombing was relatively new in WWI, and not terribly effective. And then, so was the defense against raiding aircraft–anti-aircraft, massed riflemen, searchlights, listening devices, all very new to the conduct of warfare, as were the airplanes and airships that ground forces were protecting themselves against. I was thinking about this just now after having seen the (following) short notice in the April 1918 issue of Popular Mechanics (with the text following the images, below). The diagram shows a version of an early warning system against incoming aerial assault, which was quite a good idea, complete with a central directorate to coordinate a response to the attack.
The “listening posts” were exactly that, a sort of biological-analog to RADAR–large bellow-like acoustic imaging objects that would collect distant sound and “download” themselves into the ear of the listener:
