Drones were first used as aerial targets for military gunnery practice in the 1930s. But the idea of unmanned, remotely controlled vehicles goes back even further, to a demonstration in 1898 that imagined a future of pilotless warfare. From target practice to submarine hunting to spy missions over Vietnam, drones spent decades as strictly military tools before becoming the consumer and commercial technology we know today.
The First Remote-Controlled Vehicle: 1898
The earliest ancestor of the modern drone was a three-foot-long boat. In 1898, inventor Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled vessel at an electrical exposition in New York. The boat was propelled by a small motor and rudder, and Tesla controlled it wirelessly from across the room. To dazzle the audience, he invited spectators to ask the device math questions, and it responded by blinking the lights on its antennae the correct number of times. Tesla envisioned the technology being used for naval warfare, sending unmanned torpedo boats toward enemy ships without risking a crew.
World War I: The First Unmanned Aircraft
The leap from water to air came during World War I, when the U.S. military developed the Kettering “Bug,” essentially a flying bomb. Built by the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, the Bug launched from a four-wheeled dolly that ran along a portable track. A system of pre-set pneumatic and electrical controls kept it stable and pointed toward its target. After a calculated amount of flight time, an electrical circuit shut off the engine and released the wings, sending the aircraft and its 180 pounds of explosives plunging to the ground.
The Bug had a range of about 75 miles, but it never saw combat. Fewer than 50 were built before the war ended in 1918. The Army Air Service ran additional tests in the following years, but budget cuts in the 1920s killed the program before it could mature.
Target Drones and the Origin of the Name
The word “drone” itself comes from a 1930s British aircraft called the DH.82B Queen Bee. These spruce-and-plywood biplanes were the first reusable unmanned aerial vehicles, designed specifically so Royal Navy anti-aircraft gunners could practice shooting at a real flying target. First flown in 1935, the Queen Bee could be fitted with wheels for airfield launches or floats for use at sea. A total of 380 served as targets for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy until they were retired in 1947. The name “drone,” a play on “Queen Bee,” stuck as the generic term for any unmanned aircraft.
The U.S. followed the same path. In the mid-1930s, radio-controlled model airplanes became the basis for the Army Air Corps’ own target drone program. By 1943, the Radioplane company was producing the OQ-2A, the first mass-produced drone in history, with contracts for nearly 1,000 units in a single year. Their sole purpose was the same as the Queen Bee: giving gunners something real to shoot at.
Cold War Submarine Hunting
After World War II, drones graduated from passive targets to active weapon carriers. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet submarine fleet had grown to over 300 vessels, and the U.S. Navy needed a way to attack submarines before they could get within striking distance of American ships. The answer was DASH, the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter.
In 1958, the Navy contracted Gyrodyne to develop a small unmanned helicopter that could launch from a destroyer’s deck in rough seas (swells up to 13 to 20 feet), at any time of day, in weather conditions that would ground a human pilot. The drone carried homing torpedoes and could deliver them at ranges far beyond what shipboard weapons could reach on their own. The system became fleet-operational in late 1962 and deployed to its first destroyer, the USS Buck, in January 1963. Early vibration problems grounded the initial batch of 80 aircraft for a year, but the concept proved sound in operational tests off Key West, Florida, where dozens of simulated anti-submarine missions confirmed the system worked.
Vietnam: The Birth of Spy Drones
Vietnam was the conflict that transformed drones from weapons and targets into intelligence-gathering platforms. The Ryan Model 147 series, based on the earlier Firebee target drone, flew a remarkable variety of missions over Southeast Asia: high-altitude and low-altitude photo reconnaissance, electronic surveillance, signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and even psychological warfare operations.
These drones were genuinely sophisticated for their era. Early versions carried cameras borrowed from the U-2 spy plane. Later models featured dual-camera systems with front-to-back and side-to-side scanning capabilities. The Model 147H could reach altitudes of 65,000 feet and carried camera payloads with both greater area coverage and finer resolution than its predecessors. By 1972, a modified version transmitted live TV imagery back to its controller aircraft in real time.
Some variants served double duty. The Model 147D combined reconnaissance with the original Firebee’s target role: it deliberately flew as bait to provoke enemy surface-to-air missile launches. While drawing fire, a special radar sensor relayed data about the missile system’s signals back to a nearby electronic warfare aircraft. Dedicated signals intelligence versions flew 77 missions in 1965 alone, helping map out North Vietnam’s air defenses.
The logic was simple and compelling. These were missions too dangerous or too sensitive for manned aircraft. If a drone was shot down, no pilot was captured or killed. The intelligence kept flowing at a fraction of the human cost.
From Military Tool to Everyday Technology
For roughly 70 years, from the Queen Bee in 1935 through the early 2000s, drones were almost exclusively military technology. Their roles expanded steadily from gunnery targets to weapons carriers to reconnaissance platforms, but they stayed within the defense world. The shift toward civilian use came with the miniaturization of GPS, cameras, batteries, and microprocessors, the same components that made smartphones possible. Those advances eventually made it feasible to build small, affordable drones for agriculture, filmmaking, package delivery, search and rescue, and the consumer hobby market that now accounts for millions of units sold each year.
But every one of those applications traces back to the same basic idea Tesla demonstrated in 1898: a vehicle that can move and operate without a person on board.