"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
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