The Bug | Grandfather of the Tomahawk

As it breaks out of the water, the Tomahawk starts an amazing transformation. Four fins grow from its tail, an air scoop drops down in front of them, a pair of wings flip out like switchblades, the missile jettisons the booster, and it speeds away at 880km/h. Within seconds, the Tomahawk has mutated from a rocket into an aircraft – which is just how the cruise missile started out. In World War 1, artillery was the weapon of choice, but the furthest a gun could shoot was 30km. Aeroplanes could reach deeper into enemy territory, but they had one weakness. With no accurate bomb sight, early planes had to fly so low they became targets for enemy guns. In 1917, a crack team of engineers gathered in Dayton, Ohio, to tackle this problem. Their vision was an aerial torpedo, an aircraft with the pilot removed and a bomb in his place. Inventing genius Charles Kettering would lead the team, Elmer Sperry would build the navigation system, and Orville Wright would design the airframe – the very man who had put humans in airplanes would now be taking them out again! The result was the Liberty Eagle, quickly nicknamed Kettering Bug. It was a cheap and disposable aircraft, assembled out of a box in four minutes, using only a screwdriver and a wrench. But hidden inside were 80 kilos of high explosive. The first flight tests were a series of comical errors. But then, after weeks of crashes the Kettering Bug became the world's first cruise missile in 1918. People had been flying for only 15 years, and here was an aircraft that flew without a pilot. It had an autopilot invented by mechanical genius Elmer Sperry. The heart of his machine was a gyroscope, a fast-spinning disc that stayed stable even while the aircraft was in motion. Connected to the steering with pneumatic pipes, the gyro was supposed to make the Bug fly in a straight line – that was the theory. Gyroscopes have one big problem – they drift over time. The gyros in the Kettering Bug were no exception, they had trouble keeping it on course. Building the Kettering Bug had taught missile designers valuable lessons, but in the end, the grandfather of the Tomahawk never saw battle… Clip from the “Machines of War” documentary series about the evolution of three cornerstones of the modern military – the machine gun, the tank, and the cruise missile. Watch the complete documentary here – https://youtu.be/JN92YOJcBrk Subscribe to Element 18 – https://bit.ly/337R2uO