The History Of The Drone In 9 Minutes - Drones, the uncommunicative catch-all for remote controlled UAV, have become a striking sign of modernism in the past decade. First as army scouts and killers, then as delivery devices and backyard toys, the simple class of craft seized the imagination of everyone clever enough to put the words “Game of Drones” together. But the past of drones goes back more than a 100 years. This video, formed by Mashable, captures a lot of that history in just 9 mins:
The video starts with the Kettering Bug, an unmanned “aerial torpedo” advanced for World War I, though it was never used. As an unmanned weapon, the Kettering Bug has a claim as forefather to both current drones and cruise missiles. The history's mention of the Kettering Bug is paired with the early uses of of aerial shooting and spotting in that war. Done first by manned craft, scouting from the sky remains the main role of drones to this day. The MQ-1 Predator was initially developed as a scouting plane, and hand-tossed army drones like the Raven are at their core just video cameras with wings.
What is particularly important is how the video differentiates among drone strikes, a policy, and drones themselves, which are a technology that can be used for many approaches of non-conventional war. In spite of the powerful cameras on drones, indecision persists over the identity of sufferers of drone raids.
There is only so much past that can be covered in nine minutes, and in telling the last decade of drone fighting, there are a couple gaps. One is the history of armed drones among World War II and the 1980s. Starting in WWII, drones were first used as airborne targets; the droning sound of target engines is where drones got their nickname, and a connotation with targets is part of a uniformed resistance to the popular term. But even then, drones weren’t just aims. The unmanned Teledyne-Ryan Firebee, used early in the Cold War for target drill, saw service as both a scout and a bomber in the Vietnam War.
Drones used for commerce by civilians are also a growing part of our UAVs future, and while Amazon’s distribution service plans caught headlines, there’s a whole rising world of civilian drones to explore. In justice, that history is being written today. It’s a captivating history, and there is still much to discover.
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