the first “drone” attack in history

If the war in Ukraine has shown us anything, it is that the rules of the game have changed. The drones dominate the battlefield and they don’t have to be cutting-edge creations: commercial and recreational drones They can perform precision attacks. However, the technical and even psychological foundations were laid more than 175 years ago, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire carried out the first bombing with unmanned vehicles of history against Venice.

In the mid-19th century, today’s Italy did not exist. The territories were fragmented into a series of kingdomss, but within the framework of the liberal revolutions of 1848, some of those kingdoms tried to become independent from the control of the Austrian Empire. That same year, Venice rebelled and proclaimed itself the ‘Republic of San Marco’. It was a symbol of resistance to Austrian rule and, evidently, the Empire was not going to let it pass.

Led by Marshal Radetzkythe Empire carried out a siege of the city, but as you might already guess, Venice is not an easy city to attack due to the “natural” defenses of the canals. Yes, in a war of attrition, disease and famine would take their toll on the population, but the Austro-Hungarians were in a hurry.

Faced with the impediment of bombing and attacking the city in a conventional way, someone came up with an idea as crazy as it is tempting: bomb it with drones. Well, with the drones of the time.

The UAVs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Venice

The key name in this story is Franz von Uchatius. He was an artillery lieutenant who was also an inventor. Nothing like what he proposed had ever been done and I would have loved to have been in the room when he presented his idea, but basically the plan was loading hot air balloons with explosivesand control them in some way so that they would release the bombs on the city.

Specifically, what von Uchatius suggested was launch 200 balloons both from the ground and from the SMS Vulcano (which we could consider as the first aircraft carrier in history), each loaded with about 15 kilos of explosives and a detonation system based on continuous combustion fuses (coal and cotton with fat).

Each of the ‘drones’ It would have an activation system using copper wires and, in the case of some prototypes, galvanic batteries. Remote control? The wind and a series of estimated flight calculations, as well as a very strong desire for each of the balloons to fall where they had to fall: on the city’s population.

On July 12, 1849 began the deployment of Austro-Hungarian drones, the first time humanity experienced that remote aerial threat. Now, the result was very different from what the attacking forces expected.

Military failure… BUT

Although they did the calculations, the balloon-bombers had no real guidance: they were pushed randomly by the wind. And the result was devastating for both forces, as impossible as it may seem.

The first thing is that few bombs hit the city and the material damage was practically non-existent. In fact, changes in the wind and failure in those calculations caused some of the explosions to affect the Austro-Hungarian forces. Basically, the balloons were unpredictable.

But do not think that the Venetian population had reasons to rejoice about this, since, although we may intuit that they would rejoice to see how the weapons of the enemies “revealed” against them, the truth is that the Venetians added a new concern to those they already had: an unlikely attack.

The possibility of being attacked from the sky by devices like this It shocked the population and, although it was not the reason why the city capitulated days later (most likely it was due to the desperation caused by the siege), it was surely another item to add to the list of concerns.

Although useless militarily, it was the conceptual germ of an unmanned aerial attack, something that was also used in the war between the US and Spain of 1898, later it was continued exploring in the World War I (where chilling new ways to kill each other were invented) and perfected in the modern era.

Although the use of balloons with dangerous cargo has not stopped being used, and an example of this is the balloons with excrement that are thrown between North and South Korea. With all that this implies at a security level, since a few months ago they were feces, but they could perfectly have been explosives.

Images | Timetoast National Library of France

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