SERIAL TORPEDOES.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume 7, Issue 615, 11 October 1877, Page 2

SERIAL TORPEDOES.

(From the London Globe.)

Humanitarians, who look for the sapprt'ssion of war to the development of the deadliest engines of warfare, will read with satisfaction a suggestion recently thrown oat for a farther employment of the torpedo. A torpedo balloon, the device is to be Styled, ahd the name is a suffibient indication of its nature. A ballon »s to be constructed capable of rising vith a torpedo beneath it, and starting to windward of a camp or fortified city, or whatever it is desired to destroy, is to >e burst or detached by means which it would be easy to contrive, and thus to allow its cargo of death and destruction to fall into the midst of the enemy. The detachment of the torpedo, it is suggested, might be effected with great ease and certainty by means of a thin electric wire, and the proper moment for dropping the charge in order to explode it on sny given point, would be only a matter of instrumental observation and a little practice. The idea seems to be fearfully practicable, and apart from the consideration that the very perfection of modern warfare set ms really to present the most hopeful prospect of universal peace, it might be denounced as too frightful an idea to be entertained by ciyilissd combatants. By means of such an engine a a fortified place might be attacked from a point from which no guns could be brought into notion, and without the smallest opportunity of retaliation. The carnage and devastation by the explosion of a torpedo in a fo.-tress or camp would be infinitely greater than a bombshell could produce : and while to the besiegers even a failure need Involve no harm, or even danger, the balloon might be kept out of the range of ehot, and to the besieged wnuld be fraught with rain, against which no conceivable defence would avail anything. The effect of a torpedo dropped into a garrisoned fortress nr fortified camp would be something really dreadful to contemplate.