This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Science and the military share an uneasy alliance.

In the course of human history, some of the most remarkable inventions only came about because of a war effort, the latter providing the impetus and infrastructure for a country

to outstrip its enemy,

not just in weapons, but in development.

William Lawrence Bragg was already an acclaimed scientist by the time he was drafted into the army.

The youngest man ever to be honored with a Nobel Prize for Physics, an award he shared with

his father, by the way.

He had to put his promising career

on hold when all of Europe descended into the First World War. And so the 25-year-old Nobel

laureate found himself in a cavalry unit in France. In the war years, Bragg eventually shifted

into a more technical position, and he was given a very specific assignment. His commanding

officers wanted to know how to determine the position of the German artillery based entirely on

the sound that their cannons made. The cannons were loud enough for the average person to hear,

but with no real accuracy and not from a great distance. The main system for pinpointing cannon fire was based on a series of microphones lined up

along frontline trenches.

Army technicians could see the flare of a distant cannon shot and measure how long it was

before their microphones picked up the boom, since sound travels slower than light.

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