The first military drone built in serious numbers didn’t come from a defense contractor or tech giant – but from Reginald Denny, a British-born silent film actor who sold model aircraft on Hollywood Boulevard.
His Radioplane OQ-2 was the first mass-produced drone in the United States – and by the end of World War II, his company had delivered nearly 15,000 target drones to the US Army according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
From film sets to model planes
Denny, whose real name was Reginald Leigh Dugmore, starred in nearly two hundred films over a half-century period, including both silent films and talkies. Apart from being a professional actor, he was also part of a Hollywood stunt pilot group called Thirteen Black Cats.
While he never saw aerial combat due to a training injury, Denny trained for the Royal Flying Corps in World War I as an observer and air gunner. His fascination for aircraft led him to open a hobby shop on Hollywood Boulevard in 1935, which he sold model airplanes and miniature engines.
In 1936, he developed his first radio-controlled prototype. The RP-1 had a nine-foot wingspan, ran on toy train motors, and used a simple rotary telephone dial to encode radio signals. He gave his first demonstration before the US Army in 1938.
After a few improvements, like swapping the homemade parts and replacing the telephone dial with a joystick, Denny got a commission from the Army in 1939 to build 53 of these aircrafts, which were assigned the name OQ-1.
Targets that didn’t mind being shot at
During the World War II period, the military was mostly using giant fabric tubes fastened on to tow planes for anti-aircraft target practice.
But this approach had too many restrictions for realistic combat training, like unrealistically slow flight speeds and the inability to perform evasive maneuvers like a real military aircraft.
Denny argued that a radio-controlled model plane would serve as a much better training dummy for target practice, while also de-risking the lives of military personnel responsible for piloting these tow planes, who operated under constant threat of friendly fire.
First mass-produced military drone
After the initial OQ-1 order, Denny built an even more improved model which the Army designated OQ-2. Shortly after that, manufacturing was moved from Denny’s home to a proper factory in Van Nuys, California.
Denny formed the Radioplane Company, which supplied a total of 14,891 target drones throughout the course of World War II. This included the heavily mass-produced OQ-3 and a custom version built for the US Navy, which was dubbed the TDD-1 (Target Drone Denny).
Denny ultimately sold his interest in the company in 1948.
