The torpedo is named after a fish that stuns its prey with electricity
Long before it meant a weapon, torpedo was the name of the electric ray, from a Latin word for sluggishness. David Bushnell reportedly borrowed it for his submarine, Robert Fulton applied it to his stationary mines, and Robert Whitehead attached it to the first self-propelled underwater weapon in 1866.
For most of the nineteenth century, torpedo meant almost any explosive charge at sea, including what would now be called mines. Only from about 1900 did the word settle on a self-propelled underwater weapon. Around 1280, the Mamluk engineer Hasan al-Rammah described an egg-shaped, rocket-driven craft meant to skim across the water, an early imagining of the idea.
In the early 1600s Cornelis Drebbel, working for James I, fixed explosives to a beam on one of his submarines, creating the spar torpedo, used with little effect at La Rochelle in 1626. Fulton, while in France, proposed destroying ships with charges placed by submarine and in 1807 blew up a vessel in New York harbour as a demonstration. Russia used early chemically triggered mines against British ships in the Gulf of Finland in 1855, and on 26 May 1877 the Romanian boat Rândunica sank an Ottoman river monitor with a spar torpedo, the first torpedo boat to do so without going down too.
The modern weapon grew from a prototype commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian naval officer Giovanni Luppis from Robert Whitehead, an English factory manager in Fiume. Luppis's clockwork, rope-guided surface device was slow and clumsy, so Whitehead designed a tube that ran underwater on compressed air. Early trials wandered in depth until 1868, when his secret, a hydrostatic valve paired with a pendulum, kept the fins adjusted to a set depth. By 1870 it could cover about 900 metres at up to 6 knots, and by 1881 his reformed company was exporting to ten countries.
Torpedoes let small boats, submarines and even aircraft sink big warships without heavy guns. Modern versions include straight-runners, autonomous homing and wire-guided types, and a submarine-launched shot is almost certain to hit; the best defence is firing back.
Source: Torpedo
