In 1888, after the navy had selected the Howell for issue, the inventor sold the rights to the Hotchkiss Ordnance Company, which proceeded to produce fifty Howell Mark I torpedoes. They were fitted on battleships, cruisers and torpedo boats. But when the decision was taken to fit underwater tubes to battleships and cruisers, the Howell lost out to the Whitehead, and no further orders were forthcoming after the first fifty.
This would appear to be a great shame. The Howell Mark I, 14.2in (36cm) in diameter and 11ft (3.35m) long with a body made from rolled brass 1/16in (1.60mm) thick, weighed 518lbs (235kg) with either warhead or exercise head. It could carry an explosive charge of some 100lbs (45kg) of wet gun-cotton at a speed of 25 knots for a distance of 400yds (366m), although a New York Times article on the first test firing from the cruiser USS Detroit reported a run of 900yds (823m). Even after the adoption by the rival Whitehead of Howell’s gyroscopic principle, the large mass of the flywheel in the latter’s torpedo, compared with the separate smaller gyroscope in the Whitehead, would have guaranteed greater accuracy; and also far less risk of a circular run, plus no danger of torpedo air flask rupture which was to cause several warship casualties.
A larger diameter than 14.2in would have meant a much larger flywheel, or perhaps even two in a 21in Howell, with a significant increase in range. But presumably the need to equip the launch tube with a highspeed turbine to spin up the flywheel weighed heavily against the Howell. After all was taken into consideration, it has to be admitted that the Whitehead was much simpler to launch.
Finally, due to its prolonged gestation period, by the time the Howell entered general service, the Whitehead offered a much superior performance, plus a gyroscope of its own. The 400yd operational range of the Howell was suicidally close for a torpedo boat of the 1890s, and use of the Howell by battleships and cruisers at that range could only be justified by the need to administer the coup de grâce to an armoured opponent battered into silence by gunfire.
There is a tailpiece to the Howell story. In May 2013 several newspapers reported the discovery of the mid-section and tail of a Howell Mark I torpedo on the seabed off San Diego. Two Navy dolphins named Ten and Spetz were being trained to search for lost naval ordnance on the sea bottom. First one, then the other, returned to the surface to butt their nose against the divers’ boat, indicating that they had found something interesting. Their trainers were amazed to find that the dolphins had discovered a lost Howell torpedo. It was missing its practice head, due to the corrosive effect of the mixed metals on the screws holding it in place, but the midsection and tail, including the variable-pitch propellers and both sets of rudders, were in very good condition. The relic has been restored in a chemical bath to make it suitable for display. The restorers found it was marked as Torpedo # 24, and on searching navy records it was discovered that the battleship USS Idaho, conducting torpedo practice off San Diego on 20 December 1899, had in fact recorded the loss of Howell Mk I # 24.
The nineteenth century saw not only the successful Whitehead torpedo and its derivatives, but also a vast collection of strange and wonderful torpedo designs, some of which were built and tested, and others which, thankfully, remained on the drawing board or in the patent descriptions or, sometimes, never escaped the highly imaginative minds of their inventors. To fully describe them all would take a complete book, and that is just what the late Edwyn Gray produced under the title of 19th Century Torpedoes and Their Inventors. The following, therefore, is merely an attempt to classify these weapons according to their type, and to highlight certain features which, although applied to an unworkable design, still held a certain merit.
THE ROCKET TORPEDO
Surprisingly, the most popular designs involved rocket propulsion, no less than fourteen being patented between 1864 and 1893. The first example, patented by Andrew Alexander in 1864, featured spiral vanes attached to the torpedo’s body, to screw it through the water, apparently in the hope of achieving a certain degree of accuracy, always a problem with the early unguided rockets. He was followed the same year by the rocket-propelled float torpedo invented by James D Willoughby, which also featured an explosive fixed to a spar, thus combining rocket, float and spar torpedo elements.
In rapid succession came the rocket torpedoes of Robert Weir (1870), George Quick (with a claimed top speed, underwater, of 135 miles an hour, 1871), Miles Callender (with a cleverly designed warhead which pivoted down and forward to strike the hull bottom of the victim, also 1871), Reverend Charles Mead Ramus (which was a rocket-propelled float torpedo, 1873), William H Mallory (optimistically powered by charges of compressed gunpowder, 1878), William Giese (with a harpoon nose to stick in its target’s hull, 1879), Asa Weeks (an amazing twin rocket surface-runner plus spar, 1883), a disappointing example from the Royal Laboratories (1883), Washington Irvine Chambers (which was an awash runner, 1885), and Timothy Sullivan and Ernest Etheridge (the torpedo body in two sections to be steered by four central fins, 1887).
Appropriately, the nineteenth-century rocket torpedo designs ended with a bang, when in 1893 disgruntled inventor Patrick Cunningham, whose rocket torpedo design had been rejected by the US Navy, launched it down the main street of his home town, with incendiary results. What, of course, all these inventors lacked was a reliable propellant, still several years in the future, and also a means of controlling the depth and direction of their high-speed underwater missiles, which would be many more years in the making.
The Russians still favour rocket propulsion, and their modern designs are described in the appropriate chapters.
THE FLOAT TORPEDO
The second most popular configuration was that of the float torpedo, with no less than eight designs, plus the two rocket-propelled floats already mentioned above. As its name suggests, this was an underwater explosive device carried to its target by a surface float, thus avoiding the thorny problem of regulating the depth of the weapon, a device so closely guarded by Robert Whitehead as his ‘Secret’.
There was one main advantage to the float torpedo — which was also its Achilles’ heel. It was dirigible, or steerable, because it was visible to the operator. At the same time, it was also highly visible to its intended victim, whose crew would be rapidly taking evasive action and firing at the float with all the guns that would bear. Recognising this fatal drawback, several designers stressed the high survivability of their particular design of float.
In order to turn a drawback into an advantage, the inventors often stressed the fear expressed in the press of uncontrolled Whiteheads running amok among friendly ships. Unfortunately, during this early period it appeared simpler to bring the locomotive torpedo under directional control than it was to guarantee the steering of the dirigible — as was embarrassingly demonstrated on numerous occasions, including in action.
In 1862 the float torpedo invented by Warsop & Brental was actually tested by the Royal Navy. Powered by compressed air at a pressure slightly higher than that of the first Whitehead, it was steerable by tiller ropes like the Küstenbrander. However, it was propelled not by a screw but by an old-fashioned feathering paddle wheel, which was hardly guaranteed to produce any worthwhile velocity, and this was almost certainly the reason for the rejection of an otherwise promising weapon.