After the War of 1812 broke out, the Royal Navy established a blockade of the East Coast of the United States. Further development languished as Fulton focused on his "steam-boat matters". An April 1804 torpedo attack on French ships anchored at Boulogne, and a follow-up attack in October, produced several explosions but no significant damage and the weapon was abandoned.įulton carried out a demonstration for the US government on 20 July 1807, destroying a vessel in New York's harbor. Fulton then concentrated on developing the torpedo-like weapon independent of a submarine deployment, and in 1804 succeeded in convincing the British government to employ his 'catamaran' against the French. However, both the French and the Dutch governments were uninterested in the submarine. He coined the term "torpedo" about the explosive charges with which he outfitted his submarine Nautilus. In the early 1800s, the American inventor Robert Fulton, while in France, "conceived the idea of destroying ships by introducing floating mines under their bottoms in submarine boats". An early submarine, Turtle, attempted to lay a bomb with a timed fuse on the hull of HMS Eagle during the American Revolutionary War, but failed in the attempt. In the early 17th century, torpedoes were created by the Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel in the employ of King James I of England he attached explosives to the end of a beam affixed to one of his submarines, now known as spar torpedoes, and they were used (to little effect) during the English expeditions to La Rochelle in 1626. These were used on an ad hoc basis during the early modern period up to the late 19th century. In modern language, a "torpedo" is an underwater self-propelled explosive, but historically, the term also applied to primitive naval mines and spar torpedoes. Main article: Naval mine Fulton's torpedo : 238 Confederates laying naval mines in Charleston Harbor For example, in 1275, Arab engineer Hasan al-Rammah – who worked as a military scientist for the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt – wrote that it might be possible to create a projectile resembling "an egg", which propelled itself through water, whilst carrying "fire". Torpedo-like weapons were first proposed many centuries before they were successfully developed. In naval usage, the American Robert Fulton introduced the name to refer to a towed gunpowder charge used by his French submarine Nautilus (first tested in 1800) to demonstrate that it could sink warships. The word torpedo comes from the name of a genus of electric rays in the order Torpediniformes, which in turn comes from the Latin torpere ("to be stiff or numb"). In modern warfare, a submarine-launched torpedo is almost certain to hit its target the best defense is a counterattack using another torpedo. They can be launched from a variety of platforms. Modern torpedoes are classified variously as lightweight or heavyweight straight-running, autonomous homers, and wire-guided types. While the 19th-century battleship had evolved primarily with a view to engagements between armored warships with large-caliber guns, the invention and refinement of torpedoes from the 1860s onwards allowed small torpedo boats and other lighter surface vessels, submarines/ submersibles, even improvised fishing boats or frogmen, and later light aircraft, to destroy large ships without the need of large guns, though sometimes at the risk of being hit by longer-range artillery fire. From about 1900, torpedo has been used strictly to designate a self-propelled underwater explosive device. The term torpedo originally applied to a variety of devices, most of which would today be called mines. Historically, such a device was called an automotive, automobile, locomotive, or fish torpedo colloquially a fish. Bliss–Leavitt Mark 8 torpedoĪ modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, and with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. For other uses, see Torpedo (disambiguation). For the pre-1900 naval meaning of "torpedo", see Naval mine. This article is about the self-propelled weapon.
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