Tesla Built a Drone in 1898. The Navy Said No.

In May of 1898, Nikola Tesla wheeled a metal-hulled boat into the electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. The boat sat in a tank of water. There were no wires running to it. From across the room, Tesla turned a dial; the boat moved. He flicked a switch; its lights flashed. Audience members assumed it was telepathy, magic, or a confederate hiding inside.

It was, in fact, the first public demonstration of a remote-controlled vehicle. Six months later, Tesla received US613809: "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles." The patent describes radio control, multi- channel signaling to prevent interception, and — remarkably — frequency hopping to defeat jamming. These are still problems that military drone designers grapple with today.

The pitch nobody wanted

Tesla took the demonstration to the United States Navy. He proposed building large unmanned torpedo boats — what we would now call cruise missiles — that could be steered remotely against enemy fleets. The Navy thanked him politely and declined. The official view was that the system was unreliable and the technology too immature. The unofficial view, Tesla later wrote, was that the officers simply could not believe a boat could be controlled without a person inside it.

He continued to file related patents for the next several years. They covered guidance, relay logic, and what we would now call autonomous behavior — circuits that could maintain a heading without continuous input. None of it was built.

A century late

The technology surrounding the patent — reliable batteries, miniaturized radios, gyroscopic stabilization, computer-aided guidance — would not exist for decades. The first true military drones, the TDR-1 assault drones used briefly in the Pacific, did not appear until 1944, forty-six years after Tesla's filing. Practical reconnaissance drones came in the 1960s. Armed drones in the 2000s.

US613809 is now routinely cited as the founding document of unmanned aerial warfare, though the legal effect of the patent itself was nil. It expired in 1915, with the technology it described still essentially science fiction. The Navy's 1898 evaluation was not entirely wrong. The system was unreliable, and the technology was immature. The Navy was simply wrong about how long that situation would last.

See the original

The full text and drawings of US613809 are on patents.us. The drawings — particularly the multi-channel signaling apparatus — are worth a look.