CROATIAN INVENTIONS - TORPEDO

Torpedo When in 1860 as the commander of the frigate Bellona, Giovanni Biagio Luppis (born in Rijeka) was encharged with controlling littoral area and Dalmatian coast and thus had to spend a couple of winter months on board of a ship, he had the chance to think about new weapon which would enable him to perform this task from the shore, in more comfortable conditions than from the board of a ship. Luppis thus designs a small ship filled with explosive with the aim to launch it from the coast and target the enemy, guided and kept on course by means of a kind of leads. With full confidence in his weapon, called “the guardian of the coast” (salvacoste), he addressed the Ministry of War in Vienna; however, because of some evident deficiencies he did not get support for the project. Therefore, with the support of his friend Giovanni Ciotta, also former officer, and a respectable politician and later for many years a mayor of Rijeka, in August 1864 Captain Luppis signed a contract with the English engineer Robert Whitehead and started to work together with him at the invention of a new submarine weapon. Whitehead immediately realised that the approach of Luppis was old-fashioned and that the weapon had to be „transformed into a fish” and immerged into the water. Therefore, with a completely changed concept, he started to construct a new weapon – torpedo – which already before Christmas, on 21 December 1866 was presented in Rijeka to a special Committee of the Navy Department of the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War. Torpedo has not yet been sufficiently developed at that time, but soon it was improved and became efficient. Already in the seventies of the 19th century first deliveries were made from the torpedo factory “Whitehead”, which substantially contributed to the reputation of Rijeka and our engineers. At the beginning of the 20th century to the torpedo a gyroscope for keeping it on course was added, which made it much more reliable. The factory in Rijeka reached its peak at the time of World War II, when it produced several thousand torpedoes. After the war the production slowly declined and fully ceased in the middle of 60-ties of the previous century. This was the end of the hundred year old tradition of production of the one of technologically best developed weapons of the time. Ervin Dubrović