I long since lost the email from either the IRCWCC or Big gun list, but there was a discussion of rc boats of 100 years ago, some stuff of rumors of rc combat from heads of state, etc... Well, I just happened across something interesting in a biography of Nokola Tesla by Cheney & Uth (for those interested) apparently he was granted a patent (in 1898) (#613809) on controlling a radio controlled vehicle, and later that year demonstrated an electric RC boat, soon to be followed by an RC submarine... (start on pg 79 of the aforementioned book) anyways, random aside for the day...
Very doubtful for R/C. The original premise was that it was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II & his cousin, the future King George V as teenagers. However, the only year that they would have both been teenagers was 1878, well before Tesla's invention & patent. I don't think that it's inconceivable that Victorian royal children could have played with toy boats that might have looked like what their parents were playing with at the time. Maybe towed around with lines & poles to stage crude battle reenactments, but not likely R/C. JM
1898? That would have been really cutting edge stuff. Radio communication was in its infancy. How big would the boat have to be? Remember, there was no such thing as microchips.
Here's Tesla's patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=0613809.PN.&OS=PN/0613809&RS=PN/0613809 If you have trouble viewing it there, here's another copy (slightly less authoritative than the US Patent & Trademark Office): http://sslabs.altervista.org/tesla/0613809%20Tesla_Controlling%20Method%20for%20Moving%20Vessels.pdf According to this, the 1898 boat was 6' long: http://naval-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_robot_boat_of_nikola_tesla JM
My father sent me clippings from a 1930s or 40s magazine about an American who built R/C surface warships and a submarine using tube radios. I can't lay my hands on it immediately but it's somewhere in my files. They weren't combat models but the R/C technology has been around longer than I realized. Bob
