WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
No one invented the foot tail or spying. Those are just things people do. Professionals from hunters to spies have always done it in teams. People are nosy for all sorts of reasons, but in the case of a team of highly trained and well-equipped surveillance professionals, the reason is profound and compelling: You have definitely pissed off the absolute worst person you could have pissed off because whomever it is that wants you followed has serious resources.
The microphone was created in 1876 by Emile Berliner. His microphone was intended as a modification to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. It was probably first used to spy on people in the 1890s when the government first began tapping people’s telephones. Since Berliner’s initial invention, countless engineers and inventors have improved on the technology, making it more powerful and compact with every generation.
The motion picture camera was invented more or less at the same time by about thirty different French and English inventors. They all used similar techniques and often even corresponded with each other. Unlike almost every other innovation of the era, the invention of the movie camera seems to have been attended with collaboration and gentlemanly behavior. Probably because Thomas Edison wasn’t involved.
As early as the 1940s, Allen Funt was using hidden cameras to punk everyone he could find on national television. At that time, cameras had already been installed in modified fighter planes for the purpose of scouting enemy troop movements, and spies on both sides of the war were busily planting the smallest cameras possible everywhere they could. The modern hidden camera is most commonly known as the nanny cam. Designed primarily to keep a passive eye on the hired help, the nanny cam can easily be adapted to espionage.
The concept of the laser microphone probably originated with the Russian inventor Leon Theremin—famous in the West for the invention of UFO sounds in fifties sci-fi movies. Theremin spent a good portion of his adult life in a Soviet science gulag, inventing all sorts of crazy supertechnology for Stalin, including a technology he called the Buran Bugging System. As early as the mid-forties, Soviet spies were using a laser to spy on the French and American embassies from as far away as 560 yards.