Drones Are An Old Story

They've been the next big thing for more than a century

The war in Ukraine looks like a watershed in at least one way: Drones are now a staple of the battlefield.

From big Bayraktar drones to little DJI consumer drones, unmanned, remotely guided aerial vehicles have been firing rockets, dropping bombs, and spotting targets from day one. And drones are not only in the air. Outgunned on the Black Sea, Ukrainian marine drones — 5.5 metre-long speedboats — have been patrolling widely and have carried out successful attacks on Russian coastline. Most analysts see this as only the beginning. As drones get smaller and more sophisticated, they will increasingly be integrated into ground units, giving every infantryman eyes in the sky. They will be released in swarms so large they defy targeting. Or used in ways we can’t yet imagine.

It’s all very futuristic. Which is a little ironic if you know the history of drones.

There were many pre-industrial schemes for pilotless balloons and the like, but it’s a stretch to connect that with today’s drones. In this piece, I’ll stick with the recognizably modern drone. The idea for that is not a few decades old, as you may imagine. In fact, it dates all the way back to the 19th century.

The British scientist James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that visible light was only one form of electro-magnetic waves. These waves could be longer or shorter. Longer waves took more time to pass from the peak of one wave to the peak of another, so their “frequency” – the rate at which they passed from peak to peak – was lower. Maxwell predicted that electro-magnetic energy of lower frequency than visible light exists. Unlike light, human senses can’t detect it. But it is there, he insisted. Waiting to be discovered.

In 1886, the German scientist Heinrich Hertz built a simple device to test Maxwell’s theory. By creating an electrical circuit with a small gap between two metal contacts, Hertz generated sparks that flew across the gap, from one contact to the other. That was all human senses could spot. But Hertz also built a simple copper wire receiver. It detected electromagnetic pulses each time a spark snapped and crackled. These were the waves Maxwell had predicted. In Hertz’s honor, scientists initially called them “Hertzian,” but they were later known as “radio waves.”

The world’s leading scientists feverishly speculated about how radio waves could be used. Nikola Tesla imagined using them as signalling devices to control ships from far away. He also envisioned using electro-magnetic waves to send electrical power through the air. Combined, this would mean boats could be both powered and controlled by distant electrical transmitters.

In 1898, Tesla stunned audiences at an exhibition in New York City when he placed a toy boat in water and directed it from a little box — without any wire connecting the two. (British engineers Ernest Wilson and C. J. Evans may have beaten him by a year, having tested a radio-controlled boat on the Thames in 1897, but accounts are unclear.)

The idea of remote-controlled vehicles quickly became widespread. In 1909, a British filmmaker made “The Airship Destroyer,” a short movie about German airships bombing England with impunity until they are destroyed by a radio-controlled drone. (You can watch the whole film on YouTube.)

From the outset, militaries took this new science and technology seriously. It was scaled up. And soon put to work. Britain first tested what we would call a radio-controlled aerial drone in March, 1917. (The US was flying the “Kettering Bug” by October, 1918, although it flew by gyroscope and was not radio-controlled. This Imperial War Museum article is a good summary of the timeline from a British perspective.)

From a May, 1922 article published in Radio Broadcast, a magazine for American radio buffs:

Steering manless airplanes by radio — the Air Service is doing that. Steering, starting, and stopping a manless ship, by radio — the Navy has done that. And guiding torpedoes through the air from planes, and through the water from planes and from ships, by radio — Uncle Sam is also doing that.

The trajectory seemed clear. Pilotless planes and sailorless ships were the future. And the future was coming rapidly.

Take a look at the following illustration, which was also published in 1922.

Reprinted in “Amateur Operators and American Broadcasting,'“ Susan J. Douglas, in Imagining Tomorrow, Joseph J. Corn ed.

It was published by Hugo Gernsback, an early radio pioneer. Gernsback popularized the term “science fiction” and founded the first science-fiction magazine (which is why the top prize in science fiction is the Hugo Award) but what you see here isn’t some wild flight of fancy. It is merely extrapolation of existing trends. Everything in this illustration is either an improvement of an existing technology or it is based on established science which was expected to soon deliver a new technology.

And yet, this was one century ago. And if you know even a little about the Second World War, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam War, you know drones didn’t play a major role. Arguably, the first drone to enter military service and carry out really critical work was probably the Predator, which was first conceived in the early 1980s and didn’t enter service until 1995 — three-quarters of a century after Gernsback’s vision of a remote-controlled future.

So why did it take so long for drones to become serious weapons?

I can illustrate with my own little DJI drone. It’s wonderful. I can’t say enough about it. It has a huge range, I can fly it into tight spots or send it soaring into the atmosphere, and I can see all it sees as it is seeing it. It sometimes feels like an extension of me. Which makes it pretty thrilling when my drone sees sights like this.

What makes my drone so marvellous isn’t the fact that it can fly like an angel, or the fact that I can communicate instantly with it and control its flight with precision. That’s necessary but not sufficient. What makes all the difference is the fact that it can communicate instantly with me.

As we learned over the past 120 years, radio control of a distant object was the easiest part of the puzzle. Radio-controlled (RC) model planes and boats were common and cheap by the 1960s. And yet military applications of these were modest until seamless two-way communication developed, then miniaturized. Having that in place changed everything. Flying a drone into a target (or spotting a target) using only what the pilot sees from the ground is close to impossible; doing the same with near-perfect real-time communication from the controller to the drone, and back again, is easy even for a middle-aged dad like me. (Not that I have. But still.)

And yet, as different as today’s drones are from those of the past, there remains a straight line from Nikola Tesla’s vision to what we are witnessing today in Europe.

Tesla was, as usual, far ahead of his time.