A Brief History of Drones
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have been around for the better part of a century, but it wasn't until the early 1990s that drones entered the popular lexicon, mostly through their use in stealth military applications.
The first "drone" (named for making a sound similar to a male bee) was actually a boat. Introduced at an exhibition at Madison Square Garden in 1898, inventor Nikolas Tesla used voice commands (actually radio frequencies) to make the unmanned small vessel change direction, to the delight of the audience. Unmanned aircraft was subsequently used by the United States during World War Two, to train anti-aircraft gunners, and Germany, which invented a 2,300-pound bomb called "Fritz X" with four small wings and a radio controller.