Culture
The 'Insectothopter,' a Teensy-Weensy CIA Drone From the 1970s
The 1-gram listening device that flew like a dragonfly never really got off the ground.
Don't be surprised if Time's Person of the Year for 2013 is a drone: The weirdly smooth-bodied aircraft are popping up everywhere these days, whether it be in U.S. military strikes, law-enforcement surveillance or the world of urban fashion (peep this drone-proof hoodie).
But it's worth noting that the idea of drones was circulating for a long time before the machines reached their modern-age supremacy. The Austrians used unmanned balloons in the 1840s to drop bombs on Venice; shortly after the end of WWII, the Americans relied on pilotless bombers to collect data inside a radioactive mushroom cloud above Bikini Atoll.