Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1877 — Torpedo Boats. [ARTICLE]

Torpedo Boats.

The Scientific. American gives an illus. trated description of the torpedo Alarm. It says while foreign nations have bestowed chief attention upon immensely costly experiments on guns and armor, here in the United States the principal aim has been the perfection of the torpedo system. An admirably organized and thoroughly-equipped torpedo school for the navy has for several years been in existence in Newport, R. I. The work which there is done is not published, but many of its results are of great importance. There is also an army torpedo station at Willet’s Point, L. I. We have also constructed qne torpedo vessel, which is probably the most formidable craft afloat (not excepting the Italian iron-clads with their 100-ton guns), and in time of war will form the model for a fleet of like steamers. This vessel is the Alarm, which would be a disagreeable craft for a heavy iron-clad (one like the Vanguard, for instance, which went down like a shot on being slightly rammed) to encounter^ is well provided with defensive means Having sighted an enemy—say at night—her compound engines drive her headlong at him at the rate of fifteen knots per hour. As she nears him the immense electric light on her bow flashes out its glare, blinding her adversary to her own hull—which is already sunk so low that her deck is but three feet above the sea—while displaying his every proportion. The roar of her fiftecn-inch gun, as it hurls its huge shot or shell into the attacked vessel, is followed by the crash of the bow spar torpedo striking the devoted craft-thirteen feet below the water line. Then, perhaps, after a momentary check due to the torpedo recoil, the Alarm plunges forward, driving her immense ram into her adversary’s crushed side. As she swings broadside onto her foe, another torpedo spar shoots out from her side, and another torpedo is exploded under the unguarded boom of the enemy; while the machine guns under the torpedo-boat’s rail keep up a deadly fire of thousands of bullets per minute, sweeping her opponent’s decks. Her length is 172 feet, of which thirty-two feet is snout or ram—her beam iB twenty-seven feet six inches, and she draws eleven feet of water, displacing about 700 tons. She is built of thorough-ly-tested charcoal iron, and on the English bracket-plan system; that is to say, she has really a double-hull, one shell being constructed inside the other. Within the outside shell three longitudinals of great strength run the entire length of the vessel, and are connected with bars running in a horizontal direction by brackets. The different sections can be entered through man-holes, so that a person can pass from stem to stern between the inner and onter vessels. These compartments are all water-tight, so that in the event of a leak, only one section coaid fill. The whole interior of the vessel is also built in compartments which may be hermetically sealed. —Mr. James Gordon Bennett is in Russia, and says the story that he went there to get out of the reach of cowhides is a knout and knout falsehood.— BurUnalen Hawk-Ey*.