The History and Impact of Drones

Ask someone where drones came from, and they'll probably picture the military — surveillance footage, remote strikes, the war on terror.

They're not wrong, exactly. But the real story starts decades earlier, in a very different context. And it ends up somewhere almost nobody would expect: saving mothers' lives in rural Rwanda.

The Kettering Bug

The idea of an unmanned aircraft dates all the way back to World War I. In 1917, the U.S. Army asked engineer Charles Kettering to solve a specific problem: how do you hit a target without putting a pilot's life on the line?

His answer was the Kettering Bug, a biplane made of wood and cardboard that guided itself to a target and dropped its payload. It first flew in October 1918 — too late to see combat, but early enough to prove unmanned flight actually worked.

The drones we actually know today, though, owe more to one specific engineer: Abraham Karem.

Karem built a glider decoy for the Israeli Air Force during the 1973 war. He then emigrated to the United States and kept experimenting — in his own garage, with two other engineers and a pre-med student he'd met at a model-airplane meetup.

At the time, military drones were so unreliable that some needed a crew of thirty just to stay airborne. Karem's insight was that the fix wasn't bolting on more equipment. 

MQ-1 Predator

His garage prototypes eventually evolved into the MQ-1 Predator, released in 1996 — the aircraft that turned drones from a niche curiosity into a defining piece of modern military technology. Here's the part that actually surprised me most, though: what happened after the military stopped being the only user.

Drones spread into journalism, agriculture, disaster response, and — most strikingly — healthcare logistics. In journalism, drones gave reporters and everyday citizens an affordable way to capture aerial footage that once required a helicopter and a serious budget. That opened up entirely new ways to cover disasters and news.

But the healthcare example is the one worth sitting with.

In Rwanda, a company called Zipline delivers blood and medical supplies by drone, dispatched the moment a rural clinic sends a text-message order. According to reporting in Fortune, that system cut delivery times from several hours down to under thirty minutes.

Researchers tracking the program found it was linked to a major drop in blood-product waste, and in maternal deaths from delivery complications.

Sit with that for a second: the same category of technology once built to drop explosives on a target is now the reason some mothers are alive today.

None of this is friction-free, though.

The same camera that lets a journalist film a wildfire from a thousand feet up can also film someone's backyard without their knowledge. Researchers studying UAVs point to privacy, safety, and security as the three biggest ongoing concerns.

Those concerns are serious enough that the FAA held public hearings on drone privacy as early as 2013 — and legislators are still catching up.

In under a century, drones went from a secret wartime weapons project to a tool reshaping how we report the news, farm our fields, and deliver medicine to places roads can't easily reach. Along the way, they've forced entirely new conversations about who's allowed to fly over your house, and why.

Not many inventions manage to be both a weapon and a lifeline. Drones are one of the rare ones still becoming both, right now.

_______________________________________________________

AI DISCLOSURE: This post was a collaborating using Claude. I asked Claude to research the history and impact of drones. I then asked Claude to help me improve the text by correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I then asked Claude to organize that research into a blog post using a journalistic style. I reviewed the final draft and made final edits by adding images and links.

_______________________________________________________