All About the TDR-1
Today, we take the idea of an attack drone for granted.
After all, they are an integral part of our modern battlefield.
But it was still a radical new idea in the Forties.
The first attempts to create military drones capable of attacking enemy targets went the whole way back to the First World War, when Elmer Sperry used his new invention, the Autopilot, to create the Sperry Aerial Torpedo
Around the same time, Charles Kettering developed a similar weapon, the Ketting Bug, capable of striking targets thirty miles away.
While the U.S. funded both projects, neither one was used during the war and both projects were abandoned afterwards.
