underwater from the bow of the attacking vessel, which would then ram the opponent with the explosives. These were used by the Confederate submarine to sink although the weapon was apt to cause as much harm to its user as to its target. Rear Admiral David Farragut's famous/apocryphal command during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" refers to a minefield laid at Mobile, Alabama. On 26 May 1877, during the Romanian War of Independence, the Romanian spar torpedo boat attacked and sank the Ottoman river monitor Seyfi. This was the first instance in history when a torpedo boat sank its targets without also sinking. Invention of the modern torpedo A prototype of the self-propelled torpedo was created on a commission placed by Giovanni Luppis, an Austro-Hungarian naval officer from Rijeka (modern-day Croatia), at the time a port city of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Robert Whitehead, an English engineer who was the manager of a town factory. In 1864, Luppis presented Whitehead with the plans of the Salvacoste ("Coastsaver"), a floating weapon driven by ropes from the land that had been dismissed by the naval authorities due to the impractical steering and propulsion mechanisms. In 1866, Whitehead invented the first effective self-propelled torpedo, the eponymous Whitehead torpedo, the first modern torpedo. French and German inventions followed closely, and the term torpedo came to describe self-propelled projectiles that traveled under or on water. By 1900, the term no longer included mines and booby-traps as the navies of the world added submarines, torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers to their fleets. Whitehead was unable to improve the machine substantially, since the clockwork motor, attached ropes, and surface attack mode all contributed to a slow and cumbersome weapon. However, he kept considering the problem after the contract had finished, and eventually developed a tubular device, designed to run underwater on its own, and powered by compressed air. The result was a submarine weapon, the Minenschiff (mine ship), the first modern self-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Austrian Imperial Naval commission on 21 December 1866. The first trials were not successful as the weapon was unable to maintain a course at a steady depth. After much work, Whitehead introduced his "secret" in 1868 which overcame this. It was a mechanism consisting of a hydrostatic valve and pendulum that caused the torpedo's hydroplanes to be adjusted to maintain a