Torpedo : The Complete History of the World's Most Revolutionary Naval Weapon / Roger Branfill-Cook

Barnsley, United Kingdom : Seaforth Publishing, 2014

Hbk 256 pages

The torpedo was the greatest single game-changer in the history of naval warfare. For the first time it allowed any small, cheap torpedo-firing vessel - and by extension a small minor navy - to threaten the largest and most powerful warships afloat. The traditional concept of seapower, based on huge fleets of expensive capital ships, required radical thinking.
It had long been understood that the most effective way of sinking a ship is to make a hole below the waterline, but centuries of experiments had failed to produce an effective method of achieving this. After many false starts and developmental cul-de-sacs, the answer proved to be the `locomotive` or self propelled torpedo, which became a practical proposition in the late nineteenth century.

9781848322158

623.418

English

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