In the summer and autumn of 1804 the Admiralty was particularly interested in operations to damage or destroy the French invasion flotilla of more than a thousand vessels assembling in and outside the harbour of Boulogne. This article describes the machines invented by an American engineer, Robert Fulton. He called them torpedoes “in consequence of the shock they give”, after the genus of electric rays also called torpedoes that stun their prey with electricity; in modern terms they were sea mines.
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