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SEA OF SHADOWS 109
on the armed Turkish steamer Intibah. Both shots were direct hits, and the
resulting explosions devastated the Turkish ship. The wreckage of the
Intibah slipped beneath the waves in less than two minutes.
In many ways, the attack was less impressive than Whitehead might
have hoped for. The Intibah—although armed—was not an ironclad, so
the torpedo’s effectiveness still had not been demonstrated against a fully
armored warship. (In fact, the Tchesma and Sinope had conducted earlier
attacks on the Turkish ironclad Mahmoudieh, but both of their torpedoes
had missed the target.) Still, details notwithstanding, history had been
made: automotive torpedoes had struck and destroyed an armed vessel
under conditions of actual combat. The torpedo was no longer a curiosity,
or even a theoretical weapon. It was an engine of war. The race to acquire
and perfect torpedo technology rose to a level approaching frenzy.
The torpedo, in various designs, saw use in several sea battles over the
next few decades, with wildly varying degrees of success. The mixed
results were the product of two factors: one positive and one negative. On
the positive side, the destructive energy that a torpedo could deliver was
astounding; it was not at all unusual for a single torpedo hit to cripple or
sink a fully armored warship. On the negative side, the lack of a selfcorrecting
steering mechanism made it difficult to actually hit a target with
any real degree of reliability.
In the early 1890s, Whitehead became convinced that the torpedo
steering problem could be solved by installing a gyroscope. (Invented in
1852 by French physicist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, the gyroscope was
known to have interesting properties but was generally thought to have no
practical application.) Whitehead embarked on a series of experiments
using a Russian-made gyro called a Petrovich. Despite its promise, the
Russian gyro was too crudely made to suit Whitehead’s purpose. In 1895,
Whitehead turned his attention to a precision-built gyroscope designed by
an Austrian naval engineer named Ludwig Obry. Unlike the Russian
model, Obry’s gyroscope could achieve and maintain a high enough
rotation speed (about 2,400 rpm) to give a torpedo both duration and
accuracy.
Whitehead attached the gyro to a two-way air valve, which directed
measured quantities of compressed air to a steering engine whenever a
torpedo began to deviate from its directed path through the water. The
steering engine was connected in turn to the torpedo’s vertical fins, which
Whitehead re-engineered into turnable rudders. It was an ingenious
solution to a problem that had plagued the automotive torpedo ever since
its birth in 1866. Gyroscopic steering increased the accuracy of the