The phrase “paying load” or “paying weight” originally referred to products transported by rail. It referred specifically to the weight whose transportation was paid for. The first time the word payload appeared was in the journal of the US-based Society of Automotive Engineers. This association was established by a group of professionals who wanted to establish standards and best practises across the transportation industries. Henry Ford was one of its first members in 1904. As a group it became more and more influential. Today with over 100,000 members and flourishing under the name SAE International it is one of the key drivers for standards in the area of mobility engineering. In a journal recording its transactions in 1914 there was a description of a truck “designed to carry a pay-load of 5,000 pounds”. (The Transactions of the Society of Automotive Engineers also used “underdrive” in English for the first time”).
In relation to aviation, the word was used in relation to the Gallaudet biplane which was developed for the US Navy as an observation plane. In 1920 Everyday Engineering Magazine stated that the plane could carry a payload of 1,000 pounds. It was only at the beginning of the Second World War that payload was used to describe the weight of bombs that could be carried by a plane or a missile. When space travel came not long afterwards, the payload related to crewed spacecraft or satellites.
A more modern payload is launched by a computer virus and is the part of the transmission which generates the harmful results. This was described as early as 1989 in Lundell’s book, Virus!: The Secret World Of Computer Invaders That Breed And Destroy. There he describes the computer virus as having “a delivery system and a payload, or warhead”.
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