

For example, in 1275, Arab engineer Hasan al-Rammah – who worked as a military scientist for the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt – wrote that it might be possible to create a projectile resembling "an egg", which propelled itself through water, whilst carrying "fire". Torpedo-like weapons were first proposed many centuries before they were successfully developed. In naval usage, the American Robert Fulton introduced the name to refer to a towed gunpowder charge used by his French submarine Nautilus (first tested in 1800) to demonstrate that it could sink warships. The word torpedo comes from the name of a genus of electric rays in the order Torpediniformes, which in turn comes from the Latin torpere ("to be stiff or numb"). In modern warfare, a submarine-launched torpedo is almost certain to hit its target the best defense is a counterattack using another torpedo. They can be launched from a variety of platforms. Modern torpedoes are classified variously as lightweight or heavyweight straight-running, autonomous homers, and wire-guided types. While the 19th-century battleship had evolved primarily with a view to engagements between armored warships with large-caliber guns, the invention and refinement of torpedoes from the 1860s onwards allowed small torpedo boats and other lighter surface vessels, submarines/ submersibles, even improvised fishing boats or frogmen, and later light aircraft, to destroy large ships without the need of large guns, though sometimes at the risk of being hit by longer-range artillery fire.

From about 1900, torpedo has been used strictly to designate a self-propelled underwater explosive device.

The term torpedo originally applied to a variety of devices, most of which would today be called mines. Historically, such a device was called an automotive, automobile, locomotive, or fish torpedo colloquially a fish. Bliss–Leavitt Mark 8 torpedoĪ modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, and with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. For other uses, see Torpedo (disambiguation). For the pre-1900 naval meaning of "torpedo", see Naval mine. This article is about the self-propelled weapon.
