Special detection in France and in Italy during the First World War
Résumé
During the First World War, new engines and new ways to do war appeared: among these the “special detection” of enemy batteries (or the determination of the position of the shooting cannon on map by sound). Focusing respectively on the French Cotton-Weiss detector and on the Italian fonotelemetro, and their respective community of actors, my aim is to place the instrument in its working context. In particular, I will show that the more “rudimentary” or less precision of the instrument makes no sense when considered in the logic of its military use. I will also show how the special detection, even if abandoned after the war, was at the origin of new fecund domains of scientific and military investigations, as the submarine detection.