Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak takes another look at David Conover’s 1944 photo of 18 year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty working at the Radioplane munitions plant – the picture that launched her modelling career – and asks, what was she making?
“Though her main job at the factory was spraying down the planes with fire retardant, here she’s seen assembling the OQ-2 radioplane, (sometimes called the RP-5A, TDD-l or the “Dennymite” for its designer Reginald Denny), which was the first mass produced unmanned aerial vehicle in the world. Drones have been in the news so much recently that we often think of them as a new concept in war.”