Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

SEA OF SHADOWS 107
Whitehead called his invention the automotive torpedo (or sometimes, the
locomotive torpedo), but critics and supporters alike insisted on calling it
the Whitehead torpedo. By any title, the self-propelled torpedo
represented more than a technological breakthrough; it was a quantum leap
in naval weaponry.
In appearance, Whitehead’s torpedo was a cigar-shaped steel cylinder
with severely tapered ends. Mounted at the rear (or afterbody) of the
weapon was a propeller, which was coupled by a drive shaft to a
pneumatic motor inside the cylinder. Also mounted on the afterbody were
a pair of horizontal fins and a pair of vertical fins, to guide the torpedo
through the water in a straight line. The pneumatic motor was powered by
compressed air from a tank built into the middle section of the weapon.
The nose of the weapon was dedicated to an explosive charge, the
warhead. Whitehead used explosive gun cotton in most of his early
warhead designs, but eventually he switched to dynamite, which was more
stable and packed significantly more destructive power.
The ironclad warships of Whitehead’s day were defenseless against
torpedo attacks. Designed to repel explosive shells from naval cannons,
ironclads were heavily armored all the way down to the waterline. Since
cannon shells could not effectively penetrate below the water, naval
architects the world over agreed that it was not necessary to armor the
underwater portion of a warship’s hull. (In fact, an armored hull was
considered undesirable; the increased weight would make a ship ride lower
in the water, reducing its speed and its fuel efficiency.) As a consequence,
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, every warship in the
world was vulnerable to torpedo attack.
Nineteenth-century Sailors found the very idea of the torpedo both
insulting and terrifying. They began to refer to Whitehead’s invention as
the Devil’s Device. Many prominent naval officers condemned the
machine as a barbarous method of warfare. After all, war at sea was a
gentleman’s game, and a device that slipped in under a ship’s armor
wasn’t a very far cry from a punch below the belt. It could hardly be
considered the weapon of an honorable man.
Luckily (for its detractors), Whitehead’s torpedo had a lot of problems.
Early models had difficulty maintaining their depth in the water. A
torpedo that rose too high in the water would impact on a ship’s armor,
which might well absorb the explosion without serious damage. A torpedo
that ran too deep would pass under the target ship’s hull and miss it
completely. To make matters worse, since Whitehead’s first models did
not have steering mechanisms, they were easily pushed off course by tides
or ocean currents, frequently causing them to miss their targets.