WHENCE came the drone? Toy, tool, or instrument of terror, this addition to our skies simply suddenly appeared.

We all (or at least the oldies among us) know that Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bomb, and Christopher Cockerell created the hovercraft. But who came up with the drone?

Maybe Wikipedia will help. You look it up. The drone’s origin is not my purpose here. Nor am I aiming at the drone’s presence in our domestic skies, though, for what it’s worth, I believe drones should be restricted to licensed users – farmers, surveyors, the police, mountain rescue etc. I am strongly against adding drones to the noise and other intrusions from which we already suffer. If we want hell of earth, lacking anywhere to enjoy peace, quiet and outdoor privacy, accepting drones taking private photographs and delivering packages is how to go about it.

No. I’m here today not to complain but to applaud Google staff who are opposing the company’s co-operation with the Pentagon to ‘improve’ drone strikes. More than 3,000 have signed a letter (a letter, not an email, please note; most heartening to my "dinosaur" generation) which states: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.”

Alas, it is taken for granted that airspace is also warspace. We’ve just celebrated the centenary of the RAF. The courage of its aircrews is not to be denied; without their bravery – and the sacrifice of many – we would now be under the Nazi jackboot. Still, it’s depressing that within a decade of the Wright Brothers achieving powered flight in 1903, we humans had adopted it as means of killing each other.

That was not the vision of the true father of flight, the genius George Cayley, squire of Brompton, near Scarborough. He conceived the gliders he developed in the 1850s, one of which carried his coachman across Brompton dale, as a step towards taking advantage of "an uninterrupted navigable ocean that ought not to be neglected as a source of human gratification". Closer to Continental holidaymakers of today than fighter squadrons, his vision anticipated flight providing "a better and safer conveyance down the Alps than even the sure-footed mule". Slaughter was not in his mind.

When that arrived, the novelist John Galsworthy, best known as author of the Forsyte Saga, recognised the barbarity. In 1911 he protested: “Of all the varying symptoms of madness in the life of modern nations, the most dreadful is this prostitution of the conquest of air to the purpose of warfare.”

If that thought occurred to few then it occurs to even fewer today. So all praise to the 3,100 Google staff, out of 70,000 all told, who have plucked it from oblivion. Quite separately, 50 leading Artificial Intelligence researchers are boycotting a South Korean university which has opened an AI weapons lab. I could say that things are looking up – that warfare might indeed be “removed from the human agenda”, as Pope John Paul urged in the 1970s. But I don’t have such optimism. Do you?

THE first sun seemingly for weeks led to the hashtag “#sunshine” becoming Britain’s most ‘trending’ topic of the day. So, instead of rushing out to enjoy every second of the sun’s golden presence, the Twitter folk were locked to their devices tweeting about it.