From The Blog
Drones feel like a very 21st-century invention — something that showed up alongside smartphones and streaming. In reality, the idea of sending an aircraft somewhere without a pilot on board is well over 170 years old, and its backstory involves an actor, a future movie star, and a whole lot of bees. Literally.
The earliest known use of unmanned aircraft in combat wasn’t an aircraft at all — it was a balloon. In July 1849, Austrian forces besieging Venice launched roughly 200 unmanned, bomb-carrying balloons over the city, timed with fuses to drop their payloads below. Wind being wind, most of the bombs missed their targets (some reportedly blew back over Austrian lines), but historians still count it as the first offensive use of air power in warfare — nearly 70 years before airplanes existed at all (History of unmanned aerial vehicles, Wikipedia).
The first true pilotless airplane showed up during World War I. In 1917, the U.S. Navy’s Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane used a gyroscope-based autopilot to fly without a human at the controls — essentially an early cruise missile (History of unmanned aerial vehicles, Wikipedia).
That work led to the Kettering Bug, a secret 1918 project overseen by Charles Kettering (the engineer behind Delco’s ignition systems) with help from Orville Wright himself. The Bug was a cheap, 12-foot wooden biplane powered by a 40-horsepower Ford engine, built to carry a 180-pound bomb up to 75 miles. There was no camera, no remote control, and definitely no GPS — operators simply calculated how many engine revolutions it would take to reach the target, and after that many rotations, a cam released the wings, and the fuselage fell out of the sky like a bomb. Fewer than 50 were ever built, and the war ended before any saw combat (Smithsonian Magazine).
Here’s the fun tangent: in the early 1930s, Britain built a radio-controlled target aircraft called the DH.82B “Queen Bee,” used for anti-aircraft gunnery practice. Around the same time, Hollywood actor Reginald Denny — yes, an actual working actor — pitched the U.S. Army on his own radio-controlled target plane, the RP-1, which evolved into the Radioplane line. In 1936, the U.S. Navy officially adopted the term “drone” for these radio-controlled aerial targets, very likely riffing on “Queen Bee”: a drone, in beekeeping terms, is a male bee that exists to take orders from the hive and do exactly one job. The nickname stuck for the next 90 years (Wikipedia; Mental Floss).
Speaking of Radioplane: in 1945, an Army photographer visited the Radioplane munitions factory in California to shoot morale-boosting photos of women supporting the war effort. One of the assembly-line workers he photographed, tightening propellers on target drones, was 19-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty. Those photos launched her modeling career — and eventually, under a new name, Marilyn Monroe. Nearly 15,000 Radioplane OQ-2 target drones were built during WWII, and one of them, indirectly, helped discover one of the most famous faces in American history (Northrop Grumman).
By the Vietnam War, drones had shifted from target practice to reconnaissance. The Ryan Model 147 “Lightning Bug,” a descendant of the Ryan Firebee target drone, flew more than 3,400 spy missions over hostile territory between the 1960s and 1972 — more than half of all U.S. reconnaissance flights of the war — sparing pilots from some of the most dangerous missions in the sky (Wikipedia).
Modern military drones trace back to engineer Abraham Karem, an Israeli-American aerospace designer sometimes called “the father of the drone.” In 1984, DARPA hired his small company to build a long-endurance UAV called Amber. That design line eventually became the MQ-1 Predator, which redefined what unmanned aircraft could do and put “drone” into daily news coverage for the next two decades (Wikipedia).
The drone most people picture today — a small, camera-equipped quadcopter — is a much newer story. In 2006, a college student named Frank Wang founded DJI in his Shenzhen dorm room. By 2013, DJI’s Phantom made flying (and not crashing) dramatically easier for regular consumers, and the Phantom 3’s built-in live-streaming camera in 2015 sealed the deal. DJI has since held a commanding share of the global consumer drone market (Wikipedia — Frank Wang).
The legal side caught up on August 29, 2016, when the FAA’s Part 107 rule took effect, finally giving businesses a clear, licensed path to fly drones commercially in U.S. airspace — construction firms, farmers, filmmakers, and inspection companies included (DRONELIFE).
It’s a strange arc: a technology born from balloon bombs and gyroscope-guided “aerial torpedoes” eventually became a tool for keeping people safer — mapping construction sites, spotting a failing roof before it fails, tracking turf health on a golf course, all without anyone standing in harm’s way. That’s the part of drone history we get to be part of every time we fly: not a gimmick, not a toy, just physics and instrumentation doing quiet, useful work over a very long runway of history.