following twenty years. Starting in 1879, the French Navy also began experimenting with the type, first with the cruiser , before building a series of smaller torpedo avisos similar to Zieten. The Austro-Hungarian Navy adopted a similar organization for the confined waters of the Adriatic Sea, with flotillas of torpedo boats grouped with torpedo cruisers, which were intended to defeat enemy battleships attacking the Austro-Hungarian coast. Two of the Austro-Hungarian torpedo cruisers, and , were designed by the English naval architect Sir William White, in the mid-1880s, when there was also a period of intense enthusiasm for the type at the British Admiralty. The one-off and the two ships of the Scout class were promptly followed by numerous torpedo gunboats, two Curlew-class torpedo gunvessels, and the larger ships of the . The torpedo cruiser was seen as a ship which had the potential to become the worldwide mainstay of the fleet, combining the utility of the gunboat, the speed of a dispatch vessel, and an attacking potential comparable to a larger ironclad - "valuable during peace, and invaluable during war". However, the Archer class were badly over-gunned, which compromised their seaworthiness, and this damaged the type's reputation in Britain: the total order for the class was reduced from twenty ships to eight, and the Royal Navy promptly abandoned the "torpedo cruiser" designation completely. This may have been an overreaction: sea-officers and ship-designers alike had urged the high command to simply reduce the gun armament, and White continued to produce what were effectively torpedo cruisers under different designations, the "third-class cruisers" of the Barracouta class and the larger Medea class, designated as "second-class protected cruisers". Torpedo cruisers were also procured early by a South American navy. The Chilean Navy ordered in the late 1880s, at the Laird Brothers shipyard, two s, and , considered torpedo cruisers by some sources. These two ships would have a notable military success during the Chilean Civil War of 1891, when they attacked and sunk the ironclad at the Battle of Caldera Bay. Then in 1896 she acquired . The United States Navy was perhaps the only world navy which did not acquire any torpedo cruisers during this period - their procurement process for "Torpedo Cruiser No. 1" faltered due to unrealistically ambitious demands for high performance at low cost. By this point, however, the type was falling into disfavor. The publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan's