I never realized how difficult it was to make a reference to “THE BIRDS” movie.
Moving on, I could never get over how pervasive drones have become with the first ready-to-fly drones coming out in 2010. Since then, they have become a staple of US society, even being used to take school photos now. While their presence isn’t “in your face,” drones seem to be everywhere. After reading “Where Good Ideas Come From” and learning about the 10/10 rule (and the internet’s 1/1 rule) I thought I could apply these rules to the drones by researching their history. Apparently drones, as in pilotless aircraft, have been around since the early 1900s. In 1917 the Ruston Proctor Ariel Proctor was developed to be used during the Great War (the war ended before it could make it to the field). This was just 14 years after the successful flight of the Wright brothers. However, there’s several years of silence until the 1960s, where we finally have the first RC planes. They may have not been “drones” as we know them, but the underlying principle of them being pilotless remains. Why did it take so long for this transition from military use to consumer use? From what I could gather, it was the same situation as Charles Babbage’s Analytic Engine. The technology for drones was not readily available, while the adjacent possible at the time allowed for the concept of drones to be realized and even utilized during war times. It just wasn’t possible for drones to be employed for a mass audience. If that’s the case should we pin the introduction of drones to the public in the 1960s? Not really, I found out that while one can say that RC planes and drones carry out the same basic functions, drones are also capable of performing complex tasks that we would have never thought an RC Plane capable of. The important distinctions were looking for when it comes to the emergence of drones is corporate use, easy maneuverability, and the ability to fly autonomously.
So does that mean we still didn’t have the technology by the 1960s? Yes and no.
Drones still existed within the united states military, even though their purpose was minimized as we moved to ICBM warfare. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s to 1990s that we see the computing and electronic control systems required to make drones like the Predator drone in the February 2002 strike. Keep in mind 2002 wasn’t the first flight of a Predator drone, that was when the use of predator drones become visible to a mass audience, the first flight was in 1994. So if we were to perfectly round these numbers as 1980, 1990, and 2000, this gives us a range of 20 years: 10 years for development and 10 years for information to be viewed by a mass audience. Yet we are not quite done yet, our mass audience isn’t using drones they are just aware of them. We still need someone to start manufacturing and selling them.
Why hasn’t a company taken advantage of this lucrative endeavor yet? (outside of the negative connotations with the drone strike). You need a permit.
This is where the 10/10 rule begins to falter, when the adjacent possible becomes webbed in red tape. In 2006, we have the first permit for a non-consumer and non-military drone, ie: a commercial drone for private companies to make and sell to the public. In 2013 Amazon releases its plan to use drones to deliver packages, and in 2016 had its first successful drone delivery in the UK. Why not the US? Because it’s not legal. It might’ve been due to a certain movie series, it might’ve been due to political paranoia, but the idea of a drone acting autonomously out of human sight doesn’t sit well for America. Even though it seems Amazon’s promise won’t be fulfilled anytime soon, drone use continues to prevail. In 2018 we reached one million registered drones with 878,000 being used by regular people.
The 10/10 rule has come and gone for drones, their sudden pervasiveness was a result of the government loosening regulations and society catching up with where it should have been, and there may be a time where we will get to see drones used at their full potential.
The FAA recently greenlit the UPS for drone delivery use. This marks the first permit to allow an unmanned vehicle to act autonomously out of sight and paves the way for future companies to employ drones in their deliveries. At the same time Wing, associated with Google, is commencing trial runs of its drones in partnership with FedEx.