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Showing posts from October, 2020

Torpedo (1864)

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  Torpedo (1864) *Giovanni Luppis creates the self-propelled uncderwater missile. *"Damn the torpedoes.... Captain Crayton, go ahead! Joucett, full speed!" Admiral David Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, 1864 "Torpedoes are examined on the derk of a target ship after a test firing from HMS Snapper in 1940 The British 7,000-ton steamer Beluchistan sank after this torpedo strike by the German U-boat U-68 in 1942".                         NDespite its notoriety as a naval weapon, the fir modem torpedo was developed in landincked Austa or rather by a retired army officer in what was then the Austrian Empire stretching down to the Adriatic Sea 1864 Giovanni Luppis (1813-1875) presented his idea of using small, unmanned boats carrying explosives against enemy ships to Robert Whitehead (1823 1905), an English engineer producing stram engines for the Austrian Navy Similar devices (spar torpedoes) were also employed in the American Civil War taking place at the same time. Howe

Electrical Generator

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                             Electrical Generator (1869) Gramme fulfills the dream of plentiful, cheaply produced electricity. Inventor...             The dynamos produced   by Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry in the 1830s were little more than laboratory curiosities.It was Belgian industrialist and electrical engineer, Zenobe Theophile Gramme (1826- 1901) , who developed in 1869, the first high-voltage, smooth,direct-current generator. Information... In 1871 Gramme and the French engineer Hippolyte Fontaine entered a manufacturing partnership. In 1873 the pair discovered that their dynamo machine was reversible and could thus be converted in to an electrical motor. Their 1873 exhibit at the Vienna Exposition convinced the world of the ease of generating electricity and conversely that electricity could be reliably utilized to do heavy work.              By 1880 Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti had patented the Ferranti dynamo, a machine that he developed with the help of William Thomson (