The Dawn of the Drone: From the Back Room Boys of World War One

Priceless parts dating from 1917 of the world's first full-sized military drone aircraft are carefully preserved in the Imperial War Museum stores.

Developed by the British Army's Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy, these prototype weapons stemmed from an early form of television demonstrated before the war by Prof. A. M. Low. The remote-control systems for these aircraft and boats were invented at his RFC Secret Experimental Works, which was part of the organisation of 'back-room boys' in the Munitions Inventions Department. These audacious projects led to the development of hundreds of remotely controlled Queen Bee biplanes, used in the 1930s as aerial targets, and eventually to the machines that we call 'drones'.

The lives of inventor Archibald Low and many of his contemporaries were extraordinary, as were the times they lived through. They witnessed the first epic aircraft flights and with the aid of the very technologies that enable the development of drones, they saw air travel transformed from the precarious to the routine.

Having been largely forgotten over the intervening decades, the origins of the first drones and the achievements of these maverick inventors are finally commemorated in The Dawn of the Drone.