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King Ottokar's Sceptre, page 55 frame 13: a Syldavic anti-aircraft emplacement.
In the background there's an anti-aircraft cannon, but what is this apparatus in the foreground?

Some kind of radar? It's operated by two soldiers with ear-phones but without any screen? Or some acoustic device? Or pure artistic without a real world model?

I don't have the book to hand, but I know the device you're talking about. I think it is definitely a form of 'acoustic radar', a listening device to track incoming aircraft.

Here's a link to some pictures of them. I believe the one in King Ottokar's Sceptre looks a bit like the two pictured at the bottom of the page.

I actually remember seeing one of those pictures before and it has always stuck in my mind. The one of the Japanese listening device (fifth picture down) was reproduced in an old magazine series called The Twentieth Century where it was blown up very large. It looks like a gigantic orchestra of tubas on wheels, very surreal!

It's as you say, an acoustic aircraft detector - the ear-pieces are like stethoscope tubes, and the dishes are to amplify sound; I was fairly certain that I'd seen the reference picture Hergé based this on, but can't put my hands on it now - the Companion has drawn a blank, as have the other books I've looked at so far.
The Germans had a similar working device, the snappily-titled Ringtrichterrichtungshoerer, which looks a bit like the sort of thing that Hergé drew, and the French an array of hexagonal acoustic amplifiers; they are pictured in this article, although the pages the author links to from there appear to be down now. I particularly like the image of the Japanese "War Tuba" - it looks like some sort of Photoshop gag image now, but apparently was real!

Update: Ah, pipped at the post by the speedy intervention of H'n'R!

Apologies for jumping in there, jock! Great minds think alike, and all that...


Indeed, it's just as well they shortened it to the RRH: "Incoming aircraft attack, man the Ringtrichterrichtungshoerer... oh dear, too late!" ;-)

I'm also quite taken with the second image down in the link I gave, "The experiments of Rev J M Bacon 1898 in London", which shows a Victorian lady and an elderly gentleman with a beard listening intently through some kind of telescopic hearing aid.

Or as I prefer to think of them, Minnie Bannister and Henry Crun...! I think that might be the Reverend Bacon's Bloodnokogastroacoustiphone... You can't get the wood, you know...!

Goon Show references apart, it is sad that at this distance the efforts of so many acoustical scientists look to be madness personified: ear-trumpet hats, giant funnels, concrete walls, with some chap either wearing it, attached to it, or at least crouching about it, in the manner of Nipper the HMV dog attending to his gramophone's horn.
Yet up until radar became a realistic proposition in WWII (it had been around as a concept for a few decades by then), acoustic detection was seen as a major player in avoiding collisions at sea in fog, and combating the growing dangers of attack by air.

So well done to them, and to coco who pointed out the picture!

There are still some "sound walls" on the south coast of England used to approaching planes before radar.

As there are made out of large amounts of concrete & in a secluded area it was impractical to remove them.

I think it was Coast on the BBC which carried out some tests with actual WWII 'planes over the channel and, using these walls and microphones placed at the focus of the "dish" of these walls (the brainchild of Dr. Tucker) did actually detect the incoming craft before they could be seen.
They didn't achieve the results reported from the pre-war tests, which had apparently detected 'planes at even greater distance away, but the modern researchers admitted they didn't have the same degree of familiarity with the set-up that an experienced operator might have had back in the day.

The reflectors were all meant to be destroyed, by the direct order of Churchill, but as you say, they survived in several places, partly due to the difficulty involved, but also it is thought due to the people who operated them being disinclined to have Tucker's work totally obliterated by radar.

It is also ironic that Tucker actually invented new management structures and reporting systems for the acoustic early-warning network - with remote observers channeling information back to central stations, and thence to HQ - which were then taken over wholesale by the radar network.
Had Tucker not prepared such good communications infrastructure, radar would have undoubtedly proved less effective.