"Torpedo".
A modern torpedo, historically called a locomotive torpedo, is a self-propelled projectile that (after being launched above or below the water surface) operates underwater and is designed to detonate on contact or in proximity to a target. Torpedoes are weapons that may be launched from submarines, surface ships, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, unmanned naval mines and naval fortresses.
They are also used as parts of other weapons; the Mark 46 torpedo used by the United States becomes the warhead section of the ASROC (Anti-Submarine ROCket) and the Captor mine uses a submerged sensor platform that releases a torpedo when a hostile contact is detected.
The word torpedo comes from the torpedo genus of electric rays in the order Torpediniformes, which in turn comes from the Latin "torpere", to stun. There is no physical resemblance between the ray and the mechanical torpedo.
In naval usage, the term "torpedo" was used by Robert Fulton who used the word for the towed gunpowder charge used by his submarine Nautilus in 1800–1805 to demonstrate that it could sink warships.
During the American Civil War a "torpedo" was usually a "contact mine" above water using a "demijohn" or a similar container that would float, and below water tethered to the bottom using a line and a weight holding the contact mine just below the surface to sink a ship. Former USN Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Virginian who ended up as a Commander in the Confederacy when Virginia (after Fort Sumter) and three other states joined the Confederacy due to Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops to march on the South.
Matthew Fontaine Maury worked with underwater electrical "torpedoes" having worked with electricity under the sea in the laying of the Atlantic Cable aiding Cyrus West Field (August 1858 1st success from USA to Europe). So, M F Maury understood electricity under water thus his experiments with electrical mines at various depths under water.
Tethered and floating contact mines are what David Farragut encountered. After the leading ironclad, Tecumseh, was swiftly sunk by a tethered contact mine ("torpedo") mine in a few seconds and his ships, two side-by-side in a line were like a log jam when Farragut supposedly yelled, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" as each ship in front of him feared to move forward.
As self-propelled torpedoes were developed the tethered variety was referred to as "stationary torpedo" and later "contact mine". There were also land "contact mines" used by Confederate General Rains with great success and used by others elsewhere throughout the Civil War. Contact mines are still used to-date.
True "torpedo"s owe their creation to the mid-1800's British engineer Robert Whitehead.
The Bangalore Torpedo, invented in 1912, is a cylindrical explosive device on the end of a pipe used to clear minefields and barbed wire. As such it can be considered a land form of the spar torpedo.
The first usage of the term "torpedo" to refer to a naval explosive was by the inventor Robert Fulton who used the word for the towed gunpowder charge used by his submarine Nautilus in 1800–1805 to demonstrate that it could sink warships. This type of towed torpedo, fitted with one of several types of contact fuzes, remained in use through the American Civil War. The Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley was originally designed to use this type of torpedo.
The Civil War saw the deployment of several types of naval torpedo, most often by the Confederates, who faced a severe disadvantage in more traditional warfare methods. The simplest were floating torpedoes with contact or timed fuzes, set adrift to attack enemy forces downriver. They were, as to be expected, highly unreliable. Several types of moored underwater torpedoes were manufactured by filling waterproof kegs, casks and demijohns with gunpowder and attaching contact fuzes. These could be as much a danger to Confederate as to Union shipping, and were sometimes marked with flags, that could be removed if Union attack was deemed imminent. Rivers that had been mined with Confederate torpedoes were often cleared by the simple expedient of placing captured Confederate soldiers with knowledge of the torpedoes' location in small boats ahead of the main fleet.
Electrically-detonated underwater torpedoes were also employed. These had the advantage of being controlled by an operator on shore, so that friendly vessels or low-value enemy vessels could be ignored while waiting for the capital ships to sail over them. However, the Confederacy was plagued by a chronic shortage of materials including platinum and copper wire and acid for batteries, and the wires had a tendency to break.
The first torpedoes driven at specific targets were spar torpedoes; the explosive device was on the end of a spar up to 40 feet long projecting forward under water from the bow of the attacking vessel. When driven up against the enemy and detonated, a hole would be caused below the water line. Spar torpedoes were employed by the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley and the David class of torpedo boats, among others.
The first real torpedo was developed in the mid 1800's in Europe by Mr Robert Whitehead, who created the "Whitehead Torpedo", used by 30 navies by the First World War.
Confederate secret agent John Maxwell used a clockwork mechanism to detonate a large "horological torpedo" (time bomb) on August 9, 1864. The bomb was hidden in a box marked "candles" and placed aboard a barge containing Union ammunition—20,000-30,000 artillery shells and 75,000 rounds of small arms ammunition—that was moored at City Point, Virginia, on the James River. The explosion caused more than $2 million in damage and killed at least 43 people.
The coal torpedo was a bomb shaped like a lump of coal, to be hidden in coal piles used for fueling Union Naval Vessels. The bomb would be shoveled into the firebox along with the real coal, causing an explosion. Although the North referred to the device as the coal torpedo in newspaper articles, the Confederates referred to it as a "coal shell."
Arabs are known to have what could be described as Torpedoes as early as the 15th Century. Records tell of a self-propelled pear shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in the enemy ships and then blew up.*
The first European prototypes of a self-propelled torpedo were created by Giovanni Lupis, a retired naval engineer from the port city of Fiume/Rijeka (today Rijeka) who served in the Austro-Hungarian Navy. The design was presented to the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1860. Robert Whitehead, an English engineer/entrepreneur, was working in the Trieste port on navy projects, so in 1864 Lupis made a contract with him in order to perfect the invention. This resulted in Minenschiff, the first self-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Imperial Naval commission on December 21, 1866.
After the government decided to invest in the invention, Whitehead started the first torpedo factory in Fiume. In 1870, they improved the devices to travel up to 1,000 yards (914 m) at a speed of up to six knots, and by 1881 the factory was exporting its torpedoes to ten other countries. The torpedo was powered by compressed air and had an explosive charge of gloxyline or gun-cotton. Whitehead went on to develop more efficient devices, demonstrating torpedoes capable of 18 knots (1876), 24 knots (1886) and finally 30 knots (1890).
Whitehead purchased rights to the gyroscope in 1890 to improve self-regulation of his designs. Whitehead's torpedoes came to be called the Devil's device.
In 1877 the British Admiralty paid him £15,000 for certain of his developments and he opened a new factory near Portland harbour in 1891. The largest Whitehead torpedo was an 18 inch (457mm) model, 19 feet (5.8 m) long, made of polished steel or phosphor-bronze, with a 200 lb (90 kg) gun-cotton warhead. The air was compressed to around 1,300 lb/in² (approx 90 atmospheres) and drove two propellers through a three cylinder Brotherhood engine. Considerable effort was taken in trying to ensure that the torpedo self-regulated its course and depth.
On 16 January 1877, Turkish steamer Intibah became the first vessel to be sunk by torpedoes, launched from torpedo boats operating from the tender Velikiy Knyaz Konstantin under the command of Stepan Osipovich Makarov during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.
In another early use of the torpedo, Blanco Encalada was sunk by a torpedo from the gunboat Almirante Lynch, during the Chilean Civil War on April 23 1891.
By this time, the torpedo boat had gained recognition for its efficiency, and the first torpedo boat destroyers were built to counter it. Torpedoes were also used to equip gunboats making them torpedo gunboats, ships of around 1,000 tons displacment.
Around 1897, Nikola Tesla patented a remote controlled boat and later demonstrated the feasibility of radio-guided torpedoes to the United States military. Radio remote controlled torpedoes remained uninvestigated until the 1960s.
During World War I, torpedoes came to mean self-propelled projectiles fired from a ship or submarine. Later, torpedoes were given (homing) guidance systems.
In the inter-war years, tight budgets in nearly all navies caused them to skimp on testing their torpedoes. As a result, only the Japanese had fully-tested torpedoes at the start of the Second World War. All classes of ship from destroyers to battleships were armed with torpedoes.
The strategic thinking of all major navies was, enemy capital ships (warships) would be the primary targets of submarines, in a classic fleet action on the high seas. This was in keeping with the theory of Alfred Thayer Mahan, dominant in naval thinking at that time. Targeting enemy merchant shipping was prohibited by rules of war. Due to the heavy armor of enemy warships, there was concern torpedoes would be ineffective. The potential solution to this was a magnetic exploder which would cause the torpedoes to detonate beneath a ship, breaking its back. This had been demonstrated by magnetic influence mines in World War One. (In principle, this was correct; modern torpedoes function in this manner. An explosion below a ship causes the formation of a gas bubble, and the unsupported hull splits and falls into it.) This requires the torpedo be set to run beneath the ship, and the magnetic exploder to activate at the correct time. Germany, Britain, and the U.S. had independently devised ways to do this; German and American torpedoes, however, suffered problems with their depth-keeping mechanisms, coupled with faults in magnetic pistols shared by all designs.
Inadequate testing had failed to reveal the effect of earth's magnetic field on ships and exploder mechanisms, which resulted in premature detonation, while underruns produced duds, and concealed flaws. Kriegsmarine responded promptly in isolating and eliminating the problems. The Royal Navy cleared up their faults as well. In the United States Navy (USN) there was an extended wrangle over the issue. One design flaw had concealed another. Cursory trials had allowed bad designs to enter service. Turf protection in both the Navy and Congress prevented the mistakes from being corrected. It was twenty months into the Pacific War before fully-functioning torpedoes were issued, adding months to the duration of the war.
At higher pressures the cooling experienced by the air as it expanded in the engine caused icing problems (see adiabatic cooling). This was remedied by heating the air with seawater before it was fed to the engine. Unexpectedly, this increased engine performance further, because the air expanded even more after heating.
Germany was the first nation to field an electric torpedo shortly prior World War II, the G7e. It was slower and of shorter range than its conventional G7a counterpart, but wakeless and much cheaper to produce. On the other hand, it used a lead-acid rechargeable battery which was sensitive to shock and also required frequent maintenance and needed to be preheated for best performance before launch. To overcome these restrictions, other energy sources were researched.
The experimental G7ep, an enhancement of the G7e, used primary cells like modern electric torpedoes. Silver-oxide is the most common type of batteries in post-war electric torpedoes like the Mark 24 Tigerfish or DM2 series. Such a battery needs no maintenance and a torpedo equipped with it can be shelved for years without losing much performance.
Many navies have two weights of torpedoes:
In the case of deck or tube launched torpedoes, the diameter of the torpedo is obviously a key factor in determining the suitability of a particular torpedo to a tube or launcher, similar to the caliber of the gun. The size is not quite as critical as for a gun barrel, but diameter has become the most common way of classifying torpedoes.
Length, weight, and other factors also contribute to compatibility. In the case of aircraft launched torpedoes, the key factors are weight, provision of suitable attachment points, and launch speed. Assisted torpedoes are the most recent development in torpedo design, and are normally engineered as an integrated package. Versions for aircraft and assisted launching have sometimes been based on deck or tube launched versions, and there has been at least one case of a submarine torpedo tube being designed to fire an aircraft torpedo.
As in all munition design, there is a compromise between standardisation, which simplifies manufacture and logistics, and specialisation, which may make the weapon significantly more effective. Small improvements in either logistics or effectiveness can translate into enormous operational advantages.
Some common torpedo diameters (using the most common designation, metric or inch, and listed in increasing order of size):
Even larger sizes of torpedo tube, including 660 mm (26 inches), 30 inch (762 mm) and 36 inch (about 914 mm), have been installed on some nuclear submarines. These tubes are designed to be capable of firing large diameter munitions such as cruise missiles, as well as the standard 21 inch heavy torpedo. See torpedo tube.
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It uses material from the "Torpedo".
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