Torpedo

The torpedo is a self-propelled underwater explosive weapon launched from surface ships, submarines or aircraft to strike an enemy vessel below the waterline, first made practical by the British engineer Robert Whitehead, whose 1866 design used compressed air to drive the weapon toward its target and established the basic cigar-shaped hull form later torpedoes retained. Torpedoes became a decisive naval weapon through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving small, cheap torpedo boats and submarines the ability to threaten far larger and more expensive capital ships, a shift in naval power that shaped fleet doctrine in both World Wars, most dramatically in the submarine commerce campaigns of the Atlantic and the carrier and submarine warfare of the Pacific. Modern torpedoes have added acoustic homing guidance, wire guidance and much greater speed and range than Whitehead's original design, and remain the primary weapon of submarines and a key anti-submarine weapon of surface ships and aircraft today.