"Damn the torpedoes.... Captain Crayton, go ahead! Joucett, full speed!"
Admiral David Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, 1864
Despite its notoriety as a naval weapon, the first modern torpedo was developed in landlocked Austria, or rather by a retired army officer in what was then the Austrian Empire stretching down to the Adriatic Sea. In 1864 Giovanni Luppis (1813-1875) presented his idea of using small, unmanned boats carrying explosives against enemy ships to Robert Whitehead (1823-1905), an English engineer producing steam engines for the Austrian Navy, Similar devices (spar torpedoes) were also employed in the American Civil War taking place at the same time. However, those contraptions consisted of manually driven steam launches with explosives hanging from a long pole. In order to set them off the crew would ram the end of the spar into the target vessel and then back off again, thus pulling a mechanical trigger by disconnecting the cable linking the boat to the weapon.
Luppis's torpedo, on the other hand, was self- propelled and navigated from the land by ropes attached to it, thus greatly reducing the risk for those using the weapon. Whitehead was initially skeptical about the design's feasibility, fearing that a remotely controlled surface device powered by a clockwork motor would be too slow and clumsy to work efficiently. But he continued to mull over the concept, and two years later he created an improved automobile torpedo driven by compressed air and launched from an underwater tube that determined its trajectory.
Luppis and Whitehead thus had a major impact on the outcome of the two world wars, turning submarines into a terrifying prospect. Like an electric ray (or torpedo, the fish it has been named after), their explosive projectile weapon is capable of delivering a stunning shock to its target and is responsible for over 25 million tons of shipping rusting on the seabed.
