Listening in combat - surveillance technologies beyond the visual in the First World War

The arts of combat have long motivated humans to extend the range of, and refine the capacities of, their senses. For centuries, innovations from both military and civilian origins have extended and enhanced those capacities in ever-escalating strategic efforts to secure crucial intelligence both to win battles and win new markets. Much is known about the visual technologies that co-evolved between civilian and military usage: the telescope in the seventeenth century, the observation balloon in the eighteenth century, and the submarine periscope in nineteenth century, extended to trench usage in the First World War. We focus here on the sense of hearing, its technological enhancements, and its interplay with other senses, thereby to explore the sensory interplay of vision and sound in extreme human combat situations. We argue that, both for those at the battle front and those remote from it, the significance of this increased significant of hearing in the early twentieth century cannot be understood without reference to the combat experiences and technological initiatives of the First World War. Our core claim is that the rise of listening cultures of various forms during and after the First World War owed much to the changing technologies, strategies and behaviors, cultivated in the context of military endeavors.