TORPEDO v. BATTLESHIP.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 442, 17 November 1908, Page 3

TORPEDO v. BATTLESHIP.

Every year (says a writer in Cassell’s Saturday Journal) the torpedo becomes larger and surer in its deadly purpose. Thus we have to-day a twelve-hundred-pound monster fitted with turbine engines actuated from an air flask ninety-three hides long, made to stand a pressure of twenty-two hundred and fifty pounds to the square ihch. This, the latest and greatest dirigible torpedo, is known as the Bliss-Leavitt; and so exquisitely is it constructed that its thousands of parts fit together like the works of a watch, with scarcely a join visible. The tiny shell contains a turbine engine of one hundred and thirty horse-power; and whereas the old Whitehead had an effective range of hardly more than six hundred or eight hundred yards, the new BlissLeavitt torpedo races at railroad speed to its destination with a range of nearly four thousand yards. Compared with a torpedo boat the Dreadnought of to-day is costly and slow; compared with the submarine she is not only costly but affords an enormous target for an invisible enemy. Then, too, her crew of nine hundred, and her general upkeep, run into an enormous amount annually. To feed her costly gnus with shot and shell, even for practice, is another immense item, and as to coal, she eats it up in thousands of tons. And to think that this monster, representing all that treasure and genius can devise, might be sent to the bottom in two minutes by one of the new dirigible torpedoes !