Torpedo' Whitehead

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1, 4 January 1906, Page 2

Torpedo ' Whitehead

An intending biographer once _asked Emile Augier, the great French dramatist, for some notes about his life. ' Sir,' replied .Augier, ' I was born in 1820. Since then nothing has happened to me.' The biography of Mr. Whitehead— who passed, to the majority some weeks ago— might be written in terms as brief. He invented a new torpedo nearly forty years ago. After that nothing happened to him— except his taking-off. And even the cable-man paid no attention to that, although he is a faithful chronicler of such small beer as the death of a greyhound, or the latest limp of a race-horse, or the amours of a ballerina. ' And this is fame !'— as the late Mr. Vincent Crummies used to say.

• The late Mr. Whitehead was one of the many men of peace who invented the most deadly weapons of war. Who, for instance, has not heard of the bloodletting devices of Lord Armstrong,- Mr. Gatling, Mr. Maxim, Mr. T. E. Vickers, and the man from Galway— ' Torpedo ' Brennan ? Before the days of Mr. Whitehead's invention, the torpedo was a crude bombshell— a sort of big iron pot filled with gunpowder and perhaps some scrap-iron, and tied to the end' of a stick. It was used on sundry occasions, and with somewhat variegated results, during the great American Civil War of the sixties. But the Thing had an uncanny trick of hoisting friend as well as enemy, with a serene but ' discouraging impartiality:- Sometimes' the friend went up first and furthest. This was,, for instance, the ' case when the Confederates crept up and exploded an iron-p.ot torpedo under the ribs of .the ' New Ironsides ' (Federal) off Charleston in 1863." The big puff 'set the 'Ironsides '.rocking and dancing about like a- wounded boar. But 'the water did not get beneath .her* skin t " and the attacking torpedo-boat was cruached into smithereens. -Three months later the. Confederates sank the Federal ' Hausatonic ' off .Charleston ; imt the .

torpedo-boat accompanied her to the floor, of the Atlantic. A few days later, however, Lieutenant Gushing blew up the- Confederate ram ' Albemarle 'in Roanoke River ; and ■he got back with a whole skin in*, an undamaged launch. In 1866 the old torpedo was again successfully used on the Paranaßiver, when Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay were banded together and trying to convince) Paraguay with hypodermic injections of iron and lead. The allied ironclad, the ' Rio Janeiro,' struck her nose against two anchored torpedoes laid by the Paraguayans, took a ' header ' to the bottom, and stayed there.

As a rule, good blood-letting devices are introduced slowly, and at the point of the bayonet, so to speak, into the British army and navy. Sighted and rilled guns, for instance, were not introduced into the navy for long years after these inventions, in the hands of Americans, has sent .balls through the British ships 'as a knife goes through cheese ' in the war of 1812-15. The British War Office clung to the old muzzle-loader unjil it had been flung on the scrapheap by almost every army in Europe. Its ' experts' rejected the Maxim gun, the new rifle-sights, the magazine rifle, and the Vickers-Maxim lor ' Pom-pom '— which is now voted ' the handiest piece of light artillery in existence.' In the case of the Maxim gun and of the Whitehead torpedo, however, the naval authorities fwere wiser in their generation. But the world ha? moved at the speed of the Scotch express since the days when Whitehead invented his travelling torpedo at Fiume, on the Adriatic. The torpedo of the RussoJapanese war, with its two hundred pounds or more of high explosives, was a much more formidable dealer of destruction and death. When the Japanese torpedoers got to work on the Russian , ships in the Straits of Tsushima, they sent seven costly warships to the bottom in an incredibly short time. That famous battle bore out the verdict passed some years ago by a United States naval commission, which (says Bloch in his ' Modern Weapons and Modern War ') ' came to the almost unanimous conclusion that torpedo-boats will certainly destroy an armor-clad if they escape destruction during the two minutes in the course of which the vessel attacked will be able to use its quick-firing guns. But,' adds Bloch, * the effectiveness of defence is weakened by the fact that in all navies the number of torpedo boats is from three to seven— times greater than the number of armor-clads, and the loss of several tor-pedo-boats cannot be compared in gravity with the loss of a single armor-clad carrying an incomparably larger crew, and costing an incomparably larger sum.'

This remarkable revolution in naval warfare was made possible by Whitehead. And yet his passing goea unchronicled by the cable-man. .Well, after all, fame is a relative thing. Ruskin, for instance, was known to a certain >class as ' the old gent wot teaches drawrin' at. the Taylorian.' Among the simple folk of Haslemere, Tennyson's reputation is said to have largely depended on the fact of his being a lord and wearing 'an 'at big enough for onythin'.' And orice on a time a literary stranger was introduced to James Carlyle, the youngest, brother of the sage of Chelsea. "The stranger yen* tured the remark : ' You'll be prood of your great brother.? ' But James replied in his broad Annandalel" IMe prood o' him ! I think he should be prood o' me ! ' Which leads us back once more to Mr. -Crummies' remark : ' And this is fame ! '

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