The British developed the hydrophone during WW1, Von Hesse is correct, one of the key individuals involved was Nobel prize winning physist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford developed a piezoelectric device that converted sound into an electrical impulse which could be used to create a visual trace of the sound on paper.
By the end of WW1 hydrophones had been widely fitted to ships as small as ASW trawlers and fixed hydrophone arrays had been planted in the Channel to detect transiting submarines. These were the direct forerunners of the Cold War SOSUS arrays placed in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Contrary to popular myth there was no Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee and the fiction that there was gave ASDIC it's name for the same reasons that tanks were first called Tanks, as a deception to camouflage the true function. See Hackman's Anti-Submarine Warfare in the Royal Navy 1914-54.
I believe that the RN shared hydrophone technology with the USN from the winter of 1918 since the former got a big slice of the escort duties in the Atlantic. The first operational ASDIC set did not go to sea until 1920 or so.
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