The Predator. The Reaper. The Gorgon Stare. The Dennymite.
Today’s high tech UAVs have the lure of Hollywood to thank for their existence. One of the first drones was built by an English WWI pilot who hopped the pond to pursue his acting dream. In between small roles alongside Greta Garbo and Frank Sinatra, Reginald Denny turned his remote control airplane hobby into a military contract. His first RP-1, designed for military target practice, would become the US military’s first mass-produced unmanned aerial vehicle. “He pitched basically a radio controlled airplane to fly as a target,” says Tony Chong, the in-house historian at Northrop Grumman, which purchased Denny’s company in 1952. “A lot of people knew how to fly radio controlled planes back then. It wasn’t a big leap to teach military personnel how to use them.”
Reginald Denny, OQ-3 launch, 1940.
Denny (not to be confused with the L.A. riot’s Reginald Denny) named his company Radioplane and modified the design of his target drone, selling 53 RP-4s to the US Army in 1940. During World War II, the company manufactured 15,000 drones for the US Army from its factory at the Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. The Navy also got in on the action, calling their drones the TDD-1: “Target Drone Denny 1”. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that Radioplane started developing the technology to pre-program plane routes. The next step was fully autonomous systems, which were around as early as the mid-70s.
But before drones would become a strange sign of our robot future, Denny’s acting career would take off – he became a character actor, and appeared in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. And he and his enterprise might also take credit for helping to launch the career of the most famous actress ever. Denny, believing there was real ‘morale’ potential on his factory floor, urged the captain of the Army’s PR Hollywood division (Ronald Reagan, natch) to send over a photographer. And that’s where he found a young woman named Norma Jeane working the assembly line. Marilyn Monroe had been discovered.
How’s that for morale?