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Drones
Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs)
The History of Drones
Learn about how unmanned aerial vehicles
took over the skies.
by Tuan C. Nguyen
As
fascinating as drones are, they often come with a feeling of uneasiness.
On
the one hand, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have allowed U.S. military forces
to turn the tide in numerous overseas conflicts and in the fight against terror
without risking the life of a single soldier.
Yet
there’s concern that the technology can fall into the wrong hands.
And
while they’re also a big hit among hobbyists for being able to provide a
wonderful vantage point for capturing breathtaking aerial video footage, some
people are understandably worried about privacy issues — being spied on in our
backyards.
But
keep in mind that UAVs have had a long and established history that dates back
centuries.
What’s
changed, however, is that the technology has become increasingly sophisticated,
lethal and accessible to the masses.
Over
time, they’ve been used in various capacities such as an eye-in-the-sky form of
surveillance, as an “aerial torpedo” during World War II, and as armed aircraft
during the war in Afghanistan.
Here
now is a comprehensive history of how drones have changed warfare, for better
and for worse.
Tesla’s
Vision
The
remarkably clairvoyant inventor Nikola Telsa was the
first to foresee the coming of militarized unmanned vehicles.
It
was one of several futuristic predictions that he made while speculating on the
potential uses for a remote control system he was developing at the time.
In
the 1898 patent “Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving
Vessels or Vehicles” (No. 613,809),
Telsa described, in a seemingly prophetic tone, the wide range of possibilities
for his new radio-control technology:
“The invention which I have described
will prove useful in many ways. Vessels or vehicles of any suitable kind may be
used, as life, despatch, or pilot boats or the like, or for carrying letters
packages, provisions, instruments, objects… but the greatest value of my
invention will result from its effect upon warfare and armaments, for by reason
of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and
maintain permanent peace among nations.”
About
three months after filing the patent, he gave the world a glimpse of how such a
technology might work.
At
the annual Electrical Exhibition held at Madison Square Garden, before a
stunned audience of attendees, Tesla gave a demonstration in which a control
box that transmitted radio signals was used to maneuver a toy boat along a pool
of water.
Outside
of a handful of inventors who had already been experimenting with the
technology, few people had even known about the existence of radio waves.
Militaries
Enlist Unmanned Aircraft
Armed
forces at the time were already beginning to see how remotely-controlled
vehicles may be used to gain certain strategic advantages.
For
example, during the Spanish-American war of 1898, the U.S. military was able to
deploy camera-attached kites to take some of the first aerial surveillance
photographs of enemy sites.
An
even earlier example of a military’s use of unmanned vehicles took place
earlier in 1849 when Austrians successfully attacked Venice with balloons
packed with explosives.
But
it wasn’t until around World War
I that militaries started to
experiment with ways to further Tesla’s vision and to integrate a
radio-controlled system into various types of unmanned aircraft.
One
of the first costly and elaborate efforts was the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic
Airplane, a collaboration between the U.S. Navy and inventors Elmer Sperry and
Peter Hewitt to develop a radio-controlled airplane that can be used as a
pilotless bomber or flying torpedo.
Directive
Gyroscopes
Crucial
to this objective was perfecting a gyroscope system that could automatically
keep the aircraft stabilized.
The
auto-pilot system that Hewitt and Sperry eventually came up with featured a
gyroscopic stabilizer, a directive gyroscope, a barometer for altitude control,
radio-controlled wing and tail parts and a gearing device that measures
distance flown.
Theoretically,
this would enable the aircraft to fly a pre-set course in which it would either
drop a bomb onto the target or simply crash into it.
The
proof-of-concept was encouraging enough that the Navy supplied seven
Curtiss N-9 seaplanes to be outfitted with the technology and poured an
additional $200,000 into the Automatic Airplane’s development.
Ultimately,
after several failed launches and wrecked prototypes, the project was scrapped.
However,
they were able to pull off one flying bomb launch to show that the concept was
at the very least plausible.
The
Kettering Bug
While
the navy backed Hewitt and Sperry’s Automatic Airplane idea, the U.S. army
commissioned another inventor, General Motor’s head of research Charles Kettering, to
work on a separate “aerial torpedo” project.
To
help get the project off the ground, they also tapped Elmer Sperry to develop
the torpedo’s control and guidance system and brought in Orville Wright as a
consultant.
That
collaboration resulted in the Kettering Bug, a computerized, auto-piloted
biplane programmed to carry a bomb directly toward a pre-determined
target.
In
1918, the Kettering bug completed a successful test flight, which quickly
prompted the army to place a large order for the production of the unmanned
aircraft.
However,
the Kettering bug suffered the same fate as the Automatic Airplane and was
never used in combat, partly because officials were concerned the system may
malfunction before reaching enemy territory.
But
looking back, both the automatic airplane and Kettering bug both played
significant roles as they are considered to be the forerunners to modern day
cruise missiles.
From
Target Practice to Spy in the Sky
The
post-World War I period saw the British Royal Navy take the early lead in the
development of radio-controlled unmanned aircraft, purposing them primarily as
“target drones.”
In
this capacity, UAVs were programmed to mimic the movements of enemy aircraft
during anti-aircraft training, basically serving as target practice and often
getting shot down.
One
drone that was often used, the radio-controlled version of the de Havilland
Tiger Moth airplane called the DH.82B Queen Bee, was thought to be from which
the term “drone” derived from.
That
initial head start, however, was relatively short-lived.
In
1919, Reginald Denny, a serviceman of the British Royal Flying Corps, emigrated
to the United States and opened a model plane shop that eventually became
Radioplane Company, the first large-scale producer of drones.
After
having demoed a number of prototypes to the U.S. Army, Denny’s one-of-a-kind
business got a huge break in 1940 by procuring a contract for the manufacture
of Radioplane OQ-2 drones.
By
the end of World War II, the company had supplied the army and navy with
fifteen thousand drones.
Besides
drones, the Radioplane Company was also known for launching the career of one
of the most legendary Hollywood starlets.
In
1945, Denny’s actor friend and later president Ronald Reagan, sent a military
photographer named David Conover to capture snapshots of the factory workers
assembling Radioplanes for the army’s weekly magazine.
One
of the employees he photographed, a young lady named Norma Jean, would later
quit her job and work with him on other photoshoots as a model, eventually
changing her name to Marilyn Monroe.
Combat
Drones
The World War II era also
marked the introduction of drones in combat operations.
In
fact, the battle between the Allied and Axis powers ushered in a return to the
development of aerial torpedoes, which can now be made to be more precise and
destructive.
One
particularly devastating weapon was Nazi Germany’s V-1 rocket AKA the Buzz Bomb.
The
“flying bomb,” designed for civilian targets in cities, was guided by a
gyroscopic autopilot system that helped carry a 2,000-pound warhead upwards of
150 miles.
As
the first wartime cruise missile, it led to the deaths of 10,000 civilians and
injured around 28,000 more.
After
World War II, the U.S. military started repurposing target drones for
reconnaissance missions.
The
Ryan Firebee I, which demonstrated in 1951 the ability to stay aloft for two
hours while reaching an altitude of 60,000 feet, was among of the first
unmanned aircraft to undergo such a conversion.
Turning
the Ryan Firebee into a reconnaissance platform led to the development of the
Model 147 FireFly and Lightning Bug series, both of which were used extensively
during the Vietnam war.
During
the height of the Cold War, the U.S. military turned its focus toward stealthier
spy aircraft. A notable example of this
is the Mach 4 Lockheed D-21.
Attack
of the Armed Drone
The
notion of armed drones (that weren’t guided missiles) being used on the
battlefield wasn’t sufficiently considered until around the start of 21st century.
The
most suitable candidate, the Predator RQ-1, manufactured by General Atomics,
had been tested and put in service since 1994 as a surveillance drone capable
of traveling a distance of 400 nautical miles and can stay airborne for 14
hours straight.
More
impressively, it can be controlled from thousands of miles away via a satellite
link.
On
October 7th, 2001, armed with laser-guided Hellfire missiles,
a Predator drone launched the first ever combat strike by a remotely piloted
aircraft in Kandahar, Afghanistan in an effort to take out Mullah Mohammed
Omar, a suspected Taliban leader.
While
the mission failed, the event marked the dawn of a new era of militarized
drones.
Since
then, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) such as the Predator and General
Atomics’ larger and more capable MQ-9 Reaper has completed thousands of
missions and yet unintentionally has taken the lives of at least 6,000
civilians, according to a report in The
Guardian.
The
U.S. President Obama released statistics of drone use in 2016, stating that
since 2009, 473 strikes had killed between 2,372 and 2,581 combatants.
Tuan C. Nguyen
is a Silicon Valley-based journalist specializing in technology, health, design
and innovation. His work has appeared in ABCNews.com, NBCNews.com, FoxNews.com,
CBS' SmartPlanet and LiveScience.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-drones-4108018
