The first combat unmanned aerial vehicles was developed and patented by Charles Perley as early as 1863. Use in civil war, it was UAV bomber unit built of a hot air balloon that could carry a basket of explosives. The basket was released on a timeout basis.
In 1895 William A. Eddy developed a aerial kite that could take photographs of the ground.
In the United Kingdom, Professor Archibald Low experimented with television guidance and produced a radio controlled rocket. Archibald Low developed the first radio controlled aircraft with a successful test flight on March 21, 1917. It was a flying bomb designed to carry warhead.
In the United States, Dr. D. E Buck built a piston-engine biplane designated AT for aerial torpedo, while Charles Kettering of the Delco Company built a similar vehicle that he called the Bug. The Bug demonstrated impressive distance and altitude performance, having flown some test at 100 miles distance and 10,000 ft altitudes.
In 1909 the American inventor Elmer Sperry began designing gyroscopic devices to control the stability of aircraft in flight, these being ancestor to modern inertial navigation systems.
Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane was developed in 1916. The automatic control equipment was originally tested on a Cutis N-9 seaplane. On March 6, 1918, the Curtis prototype successfully launched unmanned, flew its 1000 yard course in stable flight and dived on its target at the intended time and place, recovered and landed and thus the world’s first true ‘drone’.
In the late 1950s. the technology existed to use pilotless vehicles for photo reconnaissance.
The term unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV came into general used in the early 1990s to describe robotic aircraft and replaced the term remotely piloted vehicle – RPV, which was used during the Vietnam War and afterward.
The invention of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
