BLISS-LEAVITT
The American firm of E W Bliss Company was licensed by Whitehead to produce his torpedoes for the US Navy. Between 1896 and 1904 they manufactured 438, 18in Whiteheads in five different models in two different lengths, namely the 3.55m (11ft 7¾in) Marks 1, 2 and 3, and the 5m (16ft 4¾in) Marks 1 and 2. The 3.55m Mark 3 and the 5m Marks 1 and 2 had the Obry gear. In addition, the US Navy purchased a batch of some fifty Mark 1a torpedoes directly from Whitehead.
In 1898 Howell sued Bliss for infringement of his patent of 1871, part of which mentioned the gyroscopic effect the flywheel drive had on azimuth control of the torpedo. The court decided that Whitehead’s and therefore Bliss’ use of the Obry gear did not infringe on Howell’s patent and the case was thrown out.
At about the same time, Bliss began to introduce improvements that would eventually lead to a torpedo of their own design. One significant change was the air-blast gyroscope, in which the wheel was spun up to 10,000rpm in around a third of a second, avoiding the slight delay in the gyro taking over control of the torpedo as it entered the water, which had led to some irregular running.
In 1904 one of the Bliss Company’s engineers, Frank McDowell Leavitt, developed his own 21in torpedo design, based loosely on the Whitehead, but using a two-stage single-wheel Curtis turbine in place of the Brotherhood-type reciprocating engine. As this drove a single propeller, the initial model suffered from rolling. Leavitt soon modified his design to incorporate two counter-rotating turbine wheels, each connected to a propeller, thus balancing out the torque and curing the rolling tendency. The design of this double unit was credited to Lieutenant Gregory Davidson, USN.
The Bliss-Leavitt torpedoes, apart from being 21in, differed from the Whiteheads by having larger warheads and a much longer range, 4000yds (3,658m) at 27 knots for the Bliss-Leavitt Mark 1, compared with 1500yds (1372m) at 28.5 knots for the fastest USN Whitehead, the 5m Mark 2. This was not quite the end of the Whitehead in US Navy service, however, as in 1908 the newly created torpedo factory was asked to produce twenty Whitehead Mark 5s, and even more were ordered at the same time from Vickers Limited in England. Between 1904 and 1906 Bliss produced about 750 Bliss-Leavitt torpedoes of Marks 1 to 3. These remained in service throughout the Great War, and were not declared obsolete until 1922.
Bliss reverted to the 18in diameter for contemporary submarines, torpedo boats and early destroyers. The Bliss-Leavitt Mark 4 was similar to the 21in Mark 3, but was intended for submarines. (The Mark 5 was the Whitehead mentioned above.) The Bliss-Leavitt Mark 6 of 1911 altered the turbine wheels to rotate in the horizontal plane, as in all following US turbine torpedo designs.
With the Mark 7, 18in submarine model first introduced into fleet service in 1912, the company launched the ‘steam’ torpedo, in which a spray of water was introduced into the combustion chamber at the same time as the compressed air and fuel. The water cooled the gases and in turning to steam increased the gas volume. The result was a torpedo capable of running 6000yds (5486m) at 35 knots. The companion 21in model was the Mark 8, which would arm the flush-decker destroyers ordered during the Great War.
The Mark 9, 21in ‘steam’ torpedo, a special short model for the underwater torpedo tubes of US dreadnoughts, was the last model manufactured by Bliss-Leavitt, and the last torpedo to be designed by them would be the Mark 10, but this would be manufactured instead by the Newport torpedo station. Orders from Bliss-Leavitt were stopped in the post-Great War economy drive, but the firm’s products would continue in naval service for many years.
CHAPTER 5
The Serious Rivals, the Dead Ends, the Hopefuls and the Hopeless
VON SCHELIHA
At first sight it may appear strange that Colonel Victor von Scheliha, a German officer who had served the Confederacy in the American Civil War and was well known as a railway engineer, might be considered a serious rival to Robert Whitehead. He offered a torpedo design for consideration by the British Admiralty’s torpedo committee which met for the first time in May 1873, and he persuaded a nephew of the Duke of Wellington to register on his behalf a British patent on his torpedo design. The nephew, Frederick Arthur Wellesley, had met von Scheliha in Saint Petersburg when Wellesley was acting as military attaché at the British Embassy in the Russian capital. Wellesley had in fact observed trials of a prototype torpedo, built to von Scheliha’s plans, on the River Neva, and he described its performance as being most satisfactory.
From his British patent it is clear that von Scheliha had at an early stage grasped the essential principles required to build a workable torpedo:
— he controlled its depth through a system of a ‘suspended weight’ and a ‘spring and diaphragm’, in other words, a hydrostatic valve damped by a pendulum, the basis of Whitehead’s ‘Secret’;
— he proposed to power it with a three-cylinder radial engine at a time when Whitehead’s early models still had a V-twin engine;
— he had discovered that a significant increase in performance could be attained by introducing a heater device to raise the temperature of the compressed air as it was fed to the engine — an improvement which was not ‘rediscovered’ for another thirty years;
— he succeeded in controlling his torpedo in azimuth, long the main criticism of the ‘fire and forget’ Whitehead torpedo, by electrical impulses passed to the torpedo by a reel of insulated wire it deployed behind it as it ran. These signals could also be used to vary its depth by opening valves to change the amount of water ballast or air in buoyancy bags.
If such a device had been constructed by a professional naval engineer in Britain, it could have been made to work. Unfortunately for von Scheliha, possessing no venture capital of his own, he had passed the plans of his torpedo to the Russian government for them to construct and test. They had encouraged the colonel to take up lodgings at an expensive St Petersburg hotel to wine and dine influential guests and persuade them to support his project.
There was one basic flaw with his torpedo design, which was that he did not intend it to explode on impact with a target, but to carry multiple warheads which could be released on electrical signals — similar to the MRV (multiple re-entry vehicle) arrangement on a ballistic missile of the Cold War. By this he claimed to be able to sink a whole fleet. But by so doing he overreached the possibilities of the design, and the Russians lost interest. Having no means to pay for his lavish entertainment, von Scheliha was condemned to a debtors’ prison, and disappeared from history, along with his torpedo.
BRENNAN
Luppis had the germ of a good idea in wanting to control his Küstenbrander from the shore. If an attacker knows that you can launch a weapon which will unerringly follow his every move as he tries to evade it, he may be discouraged from attacking in the first place. And the bolder souls who keep coming anyway will be simply blown out of the water. Luppis’ guided boat hit at the waterline; Whitehead’s unguided torpedo hit the underwater hull. Combining these two aspects, Irish inventor Louis Brennan produced his torpedo, which became the first truly practicable guided missile.