Orville Wright assisted Charles Kettering and team within the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company with the design of a self-guided aerial torpedo for potential use in World War I; essentially, the world's first armed drone. When Orville was asked in 1916 what sort of experiments he would be performing with his new wind tunnel at his newly constructed Wright Aeronautical Laboratory at 15 North Broadway in west Dayton, the papers reported he replied, "his experiments are not extraordinary in character..." (1) As he transitioned to performing tests for the top-secret aerial guided missile, the press and public would assume he was continuing to perform non-extraordinary experiments.
This post provides portions of John Wright's comments in an interview conducted in February of 1967. The comments were unscripted, and as these comments at the time were recollections of events 48 to 50 years prior, it would be expected that a number of details given by memory would include errors.
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Portions of interview with John Wright, February 11, 1967. (2)
"I first met him [Orville Wright] rather intimately in the later part of December of 1917. I was working for Mr. Kettering at the Delco at the time, and he took on a project for the Signal Corps of the U. S. Army. It was a rather unpleasant surprise for the German army and it became what was Dayton's best kept secret. [Actually, Germany would not be affected or aware of the project until well after WWI] There is a replica of the device at the Air Force Museum."
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| Kettering Aerial Torpedo "Bug" replica on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum, Dayton, Ohio. Image courtesy of National Museum of The U. S. Air Force. |
"And since it's pretty well known there's no point in being too secretive about it anymore. But this device was a guided missile; it was supposed to dump explosives in Germany at any selected point to which it was aimed. Mr. Wright was consulting engineer of the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company and a good friend of Mr. Kettering's and Mr. Kettering asked him to design an engine for this thing. [Orville didn't design the engine, but was involved in other features of the "Bug"] This engine was later built by Ralph D. Palmer in his machine shop right close to the Speedway in Indianapolis. And he assigned me the job to design and build the guidance and control mechanism of this thing. Now, at the particular time my, this job was just as fantastic as a trip to the moon was twenty years ago. It was just as fantastic as shooting a satellite by Venus or some other planet at enormous distances in the light of what we knew at that particular time. For example, the device was supposed to strike a target, at a range which was almost exactly the longest uninterrupted flight that had ever been made in an airplane. [This claim was based on John Wright's recollection that the range of the Bug was 400 miles, but it's range was only 75 miles, and uninterrupted flights of airplanes had exceeded 250 miles prior to 1917] So problems arose, problems to which there was no answers either in books or anywhere else. And as a result, a lot of test work on the control and guidance system of this device was done in the wind tunnel in Mr. Wright's laboratory on Broadway."
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| Orville Wright's Lab, The Wright Aeronautical Laboratory, 15 North Broadway, Dayton, Ohio. Photo dates to October 1917, Central Press Ass'n, from Author's collection. Orville's office was right of the main entrance (to the north). The wind tunnel was located in the white bricked back area of the building. |
"It was one of the few wind tunnels in existence at that particular time. And of course, Mr. Wright was very much interested in the work, that is advice, his help where-ever he could. And for a period of about a year, we was in and out of that place almost every day."
"...the smallest part...flared out at each end to maybe three and a half to four feet. It was a very beautiful piece of woodworking. It was made of mahogany, polished till it looked just like rosewood; it was very beautiful. The interior was very, very highly polished. It had to be because it would otherwise distort the airflow through it."
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| Orville Wright's Wind Tunnel, currently on display at the U. S. Air Force Museum, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Photo by Author. |
For more information on Orville's Laboratory and wind tunnel, see my post:
15 North Broadway- The Wright Aeronautical Laboratory
"The explosive was in the fuselage, that was a rather interesting device. I said Mr. Wright designed the air frame he did, but Dayton-Wright Airplane Company worked out some very unique manufacturing schemes to build it. It was a very nice little aircraft. It had a wing span of about thirteen feet. It was about ten feet long. [Actual Wing span was 14' ft, 11.5in. Length was 12 ft, 6 in.] But it was designed to use up all the scraps of the spruce wood that they couldn't use for making DH airplanes at Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, because in those days, all aircraft was built of wood."
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| Dayton-Wright Airplane Company Plant #1, with South Field west (to the right in this photo) of the Plant buildings. Test of the Kettering Bug were performed in the South Field. Image circa 1918 courtesy of Wright State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives, Dayton-Wright Airplane Company Photographs (MS-152) > 193, Core Scholar. |
"There was no metal, and they used spruce, because it was a pure grain, strong wood; they carved it into fantastic intricate shapes and this, particular job was designed to use up the short lengths and the scrap wood that couldn't be built into DH Airplanes. The wings were covered with paper, and the fuselage was a cylinder of cardboard impregnated with rosin, about five feet long. The tail section was a cone of cardboard, and it was so designed that it could be put together very quickly. One of the specifications was that it must be packaged in a crate with minimum cubic foot capacity. Because all transport to Europe was by ship. And the cubic contents, the cubic space occupied by a box, was vastly important, because that determined how many boxes the shop could carry. So this device was designed to occupy the minimum cubic space when packed, yet it was required that two men from the time they touched the box, till the time it was in the air, less than five minutes would elapse. A fantastic assembly job. The thing was put together so it had bolts of one size, sot that it took only one wrench to put it together, and each box carried two of these wrenches. The explosive was in the lower half of the fuselage and the control guidance mechanism was right above it. And it was so designed that when it reached its range, the mechanism operated a latch that released the wings, the wings just folded up the device, the wings folded away and then the fuselage with its engine, became a free falling bomb... Well, four hundred miles was its maximum range." [Actual range was 75 miles]
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| Dayton-Wright Airplane Company workers, fashioning parts for the Kettering Bug. John Sheats collection. |
"The, artillery range officer gave the compass directions and the distance, to the target. That's all that was necessary to know. Then the guidance mechanism was just rotated around to where the compass correction read that many degrees, we set the distance on a log if it was, since this was an artillery project, it all had to be in yards, and the range you would say, fifty thousand two hundred and ninety yards, and we just set five-o two nine-o on the distance control mechanism and as soon as it took off, it began to count backwards, each yard, and at the end of that time, why then the wings folded up......It would travel around sixty, seventy miles an hour. [ Maximum speed was 120 mph] Fifty were built; there was none ever used. This whole thing was one of the most fantastic and most ironical stories that you ever saw."
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| Dayton-Wright Airplane Company assembly in process of Kettering Bug with engines installed. John Sheats collection. |
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| Kettering Bug supported from above while George Maxwell (left), Edd Whipp (center), and Frank Whipp (right) make adjustments. John Sheats collection. |
"On the twenty-fourth day of December 1917, that was Christmas Eve, Mr. Kettering took on the contract with the Signal Corps to build this device that I have been describing. And he walked out of his office over through the office where I was working and he says, get your stuff together, and go down to the garage and get in my car and I'll be down shortly.....he took me over to a residence, just north of Rike's new garage downtown. It was on property that's now occupied by the Talbot Building, and here had set up a laboratory to do research work and he took me in what was the stable of this fine old mansion, they were rapidly converting into a machine shop and an office. And he says, now this is your office, and here's what you've got to do. And he told me about the specifications of this thing that he had taken on. It was to have a range of two hundred miles [Actually 75 miles] carrying two hundred pounds of explosive. [180 lbs of explosive] It was to weigh less than five hundred pounds. [Total weight loaded was 530 lbs.] It was to be packaged so that the two men could unpack it, set it, and fire it within the space of five minutes time, and it was to have a range such that it could be controlled over that length of space. And he says now your job is to design the guidance and control mechanism for this thing, and then he told me about how he had asked Mr. Wright to do the air frame and so, originally and electrical man, I spent Christmas day and the next couple of days in fixing up what we then called a wireless system; we call it radio control today. And when the boss come in, a couple days later, he says, now look, you know better than that. He says this thing, we are not going to have any such devices as that because if it gets over the German lines, all they got to do is jam the thing, turn it around and fire it back at us. He says, we're not going to have any of that kind of thing. So then we started to look into other means of control."
"But the, as time went on, along about the middle of December, June or July I think, we had this thing ready to fly. And we flew it down at old South Field, which is down on the corner of what's now, Dixie, southern Dixie and Stroop Road. It was the old Cincinnati Highway at that particular time, and the flying field for the Dayton-Wright Aircraft Company was on that spot, it's all built up into houses now. We had one hangar over in one corner of the field, in which we did our work."
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| Preparing for a launch. John Sheats collection. |
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| Dayton-Wright Airplane Company South Field, looking east. Fuselages of De Havilland DH-4 with completed aircraft in foreground. Image, circa 1918, courtesy of Wright State University Special Collections and Archives >Dayton-Wright Airplane Company Photographs (MS-152) > 50. Church and Graveyard identified by Author. |
"When it came time to fly it, well the boss and the military, got together and blocked all the roads leading to the place, and we flew the first one, with practically no witnesses. Because we didn't want anybody to see it. But after that, we'd go down about four o'clock in the afternoon and get all set up and the shift from the Dayton-Wright would leave and by five o'clock there would be nobody around and we could fly these things all we wanted to with nobody seeing them."
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| Kettering Bug on launch rail, with others on saw horses awaiting their turn. John Sheats collection. |
"We used to set them so they'd fly around the field two or three times, and then crash in that graveyard over in the corner of Stroop and Route 25 [South Dixie Drive]. We did that for a lot reasons, first because the people that was there didn't care, and it didn't hurt them anyhow. And anybody else didn't have any business being there, so it was a good safe place to crash them."
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| An aerial view Circa 1917-1919. South Field from where the Bug was launched is indicated, and the graveyard adjacent to Zion Memorial United Church of Christ can be seen. Photo courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University. (3) |
"Well, eventually along about the middle of September, we thought we had the thing all pretty well done, so the boss invited some people to see it perform. [This test was performed on October 2, 1918 according to Military records] Now there was George Squier who was head of the Signal Corps, and his staff." [ In September of 1908, Major George Squier flew as Orville's passenger at Ft. Myer, Virginia for a flight that lasted nine minutes, six seconds. ]
"And Colonel H. H. Arnold, who was the aid to General Pershing, and incidentally he became the famous Hap Arnold of World War II. But he was General Pershing's aid at that time. [Henry "Hap" Arnold was trained on a Wright Flyer in 1911 at the Wright's Simms Station Flying Grounds by Arthur Welsh.] Colonel H. H. Arnold who was the liaison officer between the military and Mr. Kettering, and there was Orville Wright, there was Henry Ford, there was Thomas Edison, Rollinsbury, and there was several others of quite prominent, renown. And to see this thing the boss had built a kind of bleachers along one side of the field, got all these people to sit in that area. It looked just like a bunch of buzzards sitting along the fence, so we set a couple of crates out and they started to watch, and we unpacked one. Put it on the launching dolly, fired it well within the five minutes, and then followed what the military report says was the most remarkable flight in the history of aviation. Because every control mechanism on that thing went haywire and that airplane did stunts that every pilot in the country knew, and many that they didn't."
"It looped and it twisted and it turned and it flew upside down and it did Immelmanns, and it did barrel-rolls and it did what have you. We began to get concerned, how was we going to get this thing down, and had an old DH on the field over in the other corner, it had a couple of machine guns on it, they got somebody to get that thing would up to go up there and shoot it down, but before they could get it up in the air, this thing came around and made a dive right at that bunch of bleachers, and you never saw guys disappear so fast in all your life, prominent men, of every description was hunting for a place to hide behind their own shadows. And this thing come down and it just missed the top of that, well the whole crashed in the graveyard, like it was supposed to."
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| Current day 2026 view of former location of Dayton-Wright Airplane Co. Plant #1 and South Field. Zion Memorial United Church of Christ and graveyard remain. Image courtesy of Google Earth, with notes and highlights in yellow by Author. |
"So the boss, he says look fellows, he says, these people have come a long ways to see this thing fly and by blankity-blank, they're going to see it fly; now you get another one ready for heavens sake, he says, put in it just enough fuel to go around the field twice and crash in the graveyard. In the mean time, he says, I'll get these guys back up on their seat and see what happens." [This second test occurred two days later, on October 4, 1918, according to Military records.]
"So we got another one ready and a fellow poured out about a half a teacup full of gasoline put it in the tank, and screwed the top of the tank on and he never looked to see what was in the tank, we fired this one and it was a perfect shot. It went out to the end of the field, made a hundred and eighty degree turn, came back over the field and headed right straight at the boss's house. Up on the end. Right strait at it. It went over the top of that house with less than two inches to spare and right between two chimneys and disappeared from sight." [If John Wright's memory is correct, and if binoculars were used, from the center of South Field to Kettering's home is a distance of 1.16 miles. If the Bug was traveling at 50 mph, it would reach Kettering's house in 1 minute, 24 seconds. It is also possible John's memory had confused Kettering's home with a home nearer to the field such as Col Deeds Moraine Farm home, or a house closer to or within the Field. ]
.jpg "Home at Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, 1918") |
| Home shown at Dayton-Wright Airplane Company Plant #1, circa 1918. This Author has not determined where this home was located within the property, and if it could have been in the path of the Bug. Image courtesy of Wright State University Special Collections and Archives, MS-152: Dayton-Wright Airplane Company Photographs 165. |
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| 2026 Image courtesy of Google Earth with yellow notes by Author. |
"So, three of us jumped in the boss's car along with the boss; it was a Packard touring car...And he took out after this thing, and there was no paved roads in Montgomery County, all the paved roads in Montgomery County was from the front of Gov. Cox's residence to the city of Dayton. And this was out Stroop Road, and it was a gravel road, ninety degree bends in it wherever there was a bend, because it followed property lines, so the boss takes out after this thing, and he had a trick that was very effective, when he'd come to a corner. He went into it full speed until the front wheels was just about in the middle of the intersection, then he cut them just as hard as he could and tramped the accelerator down to the floorboard, well the back end came around. He had a shower of gravel and what have you, but it went right straight down the road every time. It was rather disconcerting to the guys in the back seat. But is was very effective. So General Squier and several of his staff, jumped in the car and followed us."
"We got down oh a half a mile or so from the place. Saw a farmer out in the field, putting up on his hay stack. Well, we jumped out and run over and asked him if he'd seen an airplane come by. He started to cuss, blankity-blank flyer took the top of my haystack and if I ever get my hands on him; we don't know what he would have done, because we left him standing there talking, and went on down to about where Town and Country shopping center is now."
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| 1938 map of Van Buren Township showing location of Charles Kettering property (blue star). North is up. Stroop road at south edge of property, running east/west. Route 48 runs north/south (Far Hills). Town & Country Shopping Center was constructed just east of 48, south of Stroop, where Jos. Myer property is shown. Again, this is a 1938 map, so may of been a different farm owner in 1917. |
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| Modern 2026 Google Earth map of City of Kettering, formally the Van Buren Township. For comparison, map shows location of Kettering home, Stroop road, route 48 just west of Town & Country Shopping Center. |
"There was a big dairy farm, and I never saw such a loco bunch of cows in all my life. Those cows were running and jumping, the farmer was running around with a pitch fork and the farmer's wife was out with her apron waving it up and down trying to herd those cows back in the barn, so we stopped and asked him, and if the haystack fellow cussed, this guy was the master of it. That blankity-blank flyer, he come by here and scared the cows and the cows won't go up to the milk barn because they're scared and where in the blankity-blank am I going to get milk to pay, to for my customers tonight, and who in the blankety-blank is going to pay me for the milk that I ain't going to get. And we left him talking, but we learned a lesson, don't stop." [ From the 1938 map shown earlier, perhaps the dairy farm beyond the future Town & Country Shopping Center location was Himes Guernsey Farms. Further research would be required to determine locations of dairy farms in 1918.]
"We just kept an eye out for some guy putting the top of his chicken house or for a bunch of crazy sheep or what have you and went down Stroop road and clear on down through this little town of New Burlington, on down across a covered bridge pretty soon it was just getting dusk then, just real dusk." [New Burlington, a farm community, was demolished in the 1970's preceding the damming of the creek and flooding of the area to the southwest to form Caesar's Creek State Park, with the New Burlington area becoming a spillway during high water conditions. John Wright refers to taking Stroop road, but the trip would only have been on a portion of Stroop, with the majority of the rest of the trip traveling on various roads as needed to follow the Bug's flight.]
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| From location of South Field, assuming a straight line flight toward New Burlington, the bug traveled about 16.2 miles. Modern image from Google Earth. |
"We see a bunch of lights over in the field about seventy-five yards from the road. We jumped out and run over there, and here was about twenty-five or thirty farmers. Each one of them had a lighted lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other. And here was our airplane. They was organizing a posse to go out and find the pilot. We couldn't tell them there was no pilot in there, and the last thing in the world that we wanted them to do was to go hunting for one, and while we were standing, General Squier and his staff come up to know what the trouble was. They was going out to hunt for the flyer. In those days, all flyers wore a uniform, a standard uniform. Northford jacket, pair of peg-topped pants that fit into footees, and a cap. And whenever he wanted to make a flight all he needed to do was to button his jacket and turn his cap around backwards on his head, like a baseball catchers and he was ready to fly, and that was the mark of the flyer....General Squier looked around and he saw a second lieutenant. This guy had on a cap, he had a tight-fitting jacket and he had on the most glorious pair of pegged-topped pants I'd ever seen in my life. General Squier says there's the flyer, he says, we picked him up a couple miles back, he says we'll take care of him. Well, the farmers figured the guy was in the military custody and from the tone of Gen. Squier's voice they figured that he would be most properly disciplined; they fell to and helped us hunt the pieces of the airplane, and we found all but a piece of one wing. By this time, it's nine-thirty, ten o'clock. So we left one of the poor second lieutenants to guard it the rest of the night, started back to town."
"So the next morning, we had a meeting and the military said that they were satisfied that the thing was ready to go. It was agreed that Colonel Arnold would go to France and advise Gen. Pershing what was happening and find out just where he wanted to use it and when. They gave Mr. Kettering orders to manufacturer fifty of these with all possible speed and to get in shape to build them in quantity as soon as possible. And they decided I would be commissioned a Captain in the Army and take the first fifty to France. Well, Colonel Arnold left, caught a boat in New York, and on the way over he took the flu, that heavy epidemic that swept through the country in 1919, and he took the flu."
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Orville Wright's nephew, Herbert Abeckett Wright (his oldest brother Reuchlin's son), was serving in France during this time. Herbert's wife Irene Matilda May, writing from their home in Independence, Kansas, wrote to Herbert October 11, 1918, saying, "On account of the enfluenza [sic] epidemic here all of the schools and picture shows, churches, and all public meetings are closed. Crouds [sic] of more than twenty-five are prohibited. I guess people didn't realize how dangerous that desease [sic] was until it spread to all of the camps and so many of the soldiers died from pneumonia as a result. Then it spread to the west and now it is all over Kansas and Missouri towns and altho' it is somewhat checked everyone is taking every precaution to blot it out entirely. It wasn't really the enfluenza [sic] I had a couple of weeks ago. It was just a bad cold I think...."
For more on Herbert's time in France during WWI, see my post:
The Story of Herbert and Irene Wright
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"When the boat got to England, they took him [Colonel Arnold] to a hospital in London, all too sick to talk. When he could talk, he found out that the war was over , the Germans had surrendered and the Armistice had been signed, and we found ourselves with fifty of the things already built and ready to go. No war. So the Signal Corps decided to take them to Florida to one of the airfields in, well it wasn't an airfield, it was just a big open space in Florida away from everybody where nobody would see them.....They wanted to keep it under cover as much as possible. So they asked Mr. Kettering to take out patents on it, in his own name and keep those patents in the patent office as long as possible. Well, he prepared patent applications and then by various legal maneuvers we kept the thing in the patent office until about the middle of the 1930's and the patent issue. If I'm not mistaken, it's the largest and longest patent ever issued by the patent office."
"The Germans bought up some of the patents, and filed them away for possible future use. They could see a need for this. Well, when World War II broke out, the boss resurrected the thing and equipped it with heat sensing seekers and it was responsive to heat; you could fire it in England and it would go straight to a steel mill in Germany or any place that was putting out infrared heat waves. They, they offered it to the military, but they were rather obsessed with the idea of big bombers and heavy bombers and they wanted, didn't pay any attention to it. But the Germans built it. They built the V-1. And it was identical with this device with the exception of the engine. They copied it identically right down to the very last detail with the exception of the engine. [The V-1 was quite different from the Kettering Bug. John Wright likely just assumed the Bug was the inspiration for the German V-1] They put a different engine on it. And it was the V-1 that almost knocked England out of the war......Of course, along toward the end, they had made considerable improvement on them and made them much bigger than they originally were...."
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| German V-1 Cruise Missile (kick-named buzz bomb, and doodle bug), image courtesy of National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian. "....more than 20,000 were launched at British and continental targets, mostly London and Antwerp, from June 1944 to March 1945. It carried a one-ton, high-explosive warhead and had a range of about 150 miles but was very inaccurate." |
A much different account of the October 4, 1918 flight of the Kettering Bug is presented in "Twenty-Five Years Ahead Of Its Time: The American Aerial Torpedo in World War I", by Michael H. Taint, Lt. Colonel, USAF (Ret) Independent Scholar, published 2018. Taint utilized official military records, reports from Major General George Owen Squier, and memoirs of General Henry Hap Arnold. In Taints account, amongst other differences, upon the disappearance of the October 4th Kettering Bug, Charles Kettering is disgusted, and quoted as saying, "let the thing stay up there", and left! Then, several officers, including Lt. Colonel Bion Arnold, and Colonel Hap Arnold gave chase in an automobile, but lost sight of the Bug, and returned. Upon learning it had crashed south of Xenia, they drove there, where Lt. Colonel Arnold pointed to Colonel Hap Arnold (who was wearing a flight jacket), telling the people there that Hap had been the pilot.
John Wright's account contains so much specific detail of the chase that it seems likely a true account of the events. Charles Kettering may have been disgusted, but when he "left", according to John, he went on the chase.
Copyright 2026-Getting the Story Wright
Notes:
1. The Dayton Daily News December 17, 1916, "Orville Wright Experimenting to Utilize Unused Currents of Air".
2. Interview with John Wright, February 11, 1967, Wright Brothers- Charles F. Kettering Oral History Project, University Archives and Special Collections, University of Dayton.
3. Wilbur F. H. Bigelow, Sr., Dayton-Wright Company Collection (SC-347) > 18, Wright State University Libraries Core Scholar.
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