They were anxious to understand the new threat, and to assess its potential as a weapon for attacking enemy warships in harbour. The Royal Navy was among the first to visit Robert Whitehead’s factory at Fiume (then in Austria ) and purchase the right to use his ‘secret’. Just as steam, armour, heavy rifled guns and rotating turrets provided the Royal, (and Union ) Navy with the means to transform sea control into strategic naval power projection, an English engineer quite literally knocked the bottom out of ironclad coast assault forces. The development of the locomotive torpedo in the mid nineteenth century provided a fundamental challenge for the dominant sea control navy of the era. Norman Friedman, British Destroyers: From the Earliest Days to the Second World War, Naval Institute Press, 2009.
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