War and Military Atlas

How Battles Were Fought
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Whitehead Torpedo

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The Whitehead torpedo was the first self-propelled, or locomotive, torpedo, perfected in 1866 by British engineer Robert Whitehead from an earlier design by Austro-Hungarian naval officer Giovanni Luppis. Driven by a three-cylinder compressed-air engine, it gave torpedo boats and submarines a practical weapon against surface warships, seeing combat from the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 through its last recorded use in April 1940 at the Battle of Drobak Sound in Norway.

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