"Torpedo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... agreed to warn the crews and passengers of passenger liners. We have lived up to that promise in every way. We are not out to torpedo without warning neutral ships bound for England. Our submarines have respected every one of them so far, and they have met scores in the North Sea, the ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... just then, and Phil, caught off his guard, took a header and landed astride one of the gasoline cans. "I wonder if that was a torpedo," he grunted ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... Pigg. "Whoever heard of such a thing?" but she ran out to see what it was, and at that moment the cabbage bounded right in front of the pen, hit a big stone, burst open with a noise like a torpedo, and out rolled Buddy Pigg, over and over, just like a pumpkin. But, believe me, he wasn't hurt the least mite, ...
— Buddy And Brighteyes Pigg - Bed Time Stories • Howard R. Garis
... the Captain, "the torpedo, even of the most improved type, can only keep up this speed of twenty knots for a distance of five hundred yards, within which range the boat discharging it would have to approach before sending it off at the vessel attacked, which of course would ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... would have been conquered. For what would there have been to conquer? Mr. Jeff Davis was constantly writing him to take command of a corps in the confederate army, but Col. Sellers said, no, his duty was at home. And he was by no means idle. He was the inventor of the famous air torpedo, which came very near destroying the Union armies in Missouri, and the city of St. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... to turn over the bridge when news was brought that a motor-boat belonging to Essad was in San Giovanni harbour. We sent a policeman galloping on to stop it, and followed as fast as our meagre horses would allow. We also heard that a submarine had been in the port the day before and had tried to torpedo the ships lying there—but ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... farmer may know whether or not to prepare to plow, and the Sunday school whether to arrange or to postpone its picnic tomorrow; airships mount the heavens, steamships plough the ocean's bosom, submarine torpedo boats undermine the deep with missiles of death, while photography turns one inside out, and doctors no longer guess at the location of a bullet. All these things have come to pass within my life-time. What may the young before me expect in the next ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... torpedo work," he said, in answer to a question. "That is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger responsibilities await you. If not—there's ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... inflate it. Even she understood what a terrible engine of war such an aerial ship might be, from which two men could blow up fortress after fortress and city after city when and where they chose. Armies could be annihilated, granite and steel would be as tinder before a bomb or torpedo of picric acid ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... "that says a steamer was hailed by a submarine a few miles off the Lizard Head. It escaped by its superior speed, but only by a narrow margin, for the submarine launched a torpedo that barely missed striking the after portion ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... at night against torpedo and aeroplane attacks. From that mortar Armand has shot half a dozen bombs of phosphide of calcium which are hurled far into the darkness. They are so constructed that they float after a short plunge and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity. I believe that nothing which Mary produced during this period, is marked with those daring flights, which exhibit themselves in the little fiction she composed just before its commencement. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... seemed merged, rocks did not look the same, whirlpools had a different vortex, islands of stone had a new configuration. As they sped on, lurching, jumping, piercing a broken wall of wave and spray like a torpedo, shooting an almost sheer fall, she came to rely on a sense of intuition rather than memory, for night ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Priscilla. "You've read 'The Riddle of the Sands,' I suppose. You must have. Well, that's exactly what he's at, mapping out mud-banks and things so as to be able to run a masked flotilla of torpedo boats in and out when the time comes. There was one of the same lot caught the other day sketching a fortification in Lough Swilly. Father read it to me out ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... matter-of-factness, indeed, more dreadful than any most passionate outburst. But at the root of the apparent apathy lay despair and remorse,—weary, like gorged and sleeping tigers far back in their dens. Only the dull torpedo of misery was awake, lying motionless on the bottom of the deepest ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of the Edison and Sim's torpedo is also driven by an electric motor. In this case the current is conveyed from the ship or fort which discharges the torpedo by an insulated conductor running off a reel carried by the torpedo, the "earth" or return half of ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... and that in its practice explosives are largely used. To "blow-up" effectively, whether in a literal or figurative sense, is difficult. To improve this power in war, and in the literal sense, I set myself to work. I invented a torpedo, which seemed to me better than any that had yet been brought out. To test its powers, I made a miniature fortification, and blew it up. I also blew up our ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... the game was with the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, skip-ping with pretended delight at getting to the haven where I would fain bring him. Yet no sooner did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly than he backed like a torpedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me that my labor was in vain. A dozen times, at least, this happened ere the line hinted he had given up the battle and would be towed in. He was towed. The landing-net was useless for one of his size, and I would not have him gaffed. I stepped into the ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... twelvemonth been conducting it. If this instance stood alone, some explanation, some disavowal by the German Government, some evidence of criminal mistake or wilful disobedience on the part of the commander of the vessel that fired the torpedo might be sought or entertained; but unhappily it does not stand alone. Recent events make the conclusion inevitable that it is only one instance, even though it be one of the most extreme and distressing instances, ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... turn the crank of the propeller shaft by hand until the target had been reached. When this primitive craft was closed for diving there was only sufficient air to support life for half an hour. Since the torpedo was attached to the boat itself there was no chance of escape. The only hope was to reach and destroy the enemy vessel before the crew were ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... bathing-suit, and insert him in the water, and instantly, like the gentleman in The Tempest, he 'suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange.' Other men puffed, snorted, and splashed. George passed through the ocean with the silent dignity of a torpedo. Other men swallowed water, here a mouthful, there a pint, anon, maybe, a quart or so, and returned to the shore like foundering derelicts. George's mouth had all the exclusiveness of a fashionable club. His breast-stroke ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Grahame-White and eight of his air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south coast. Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of Heligoland. We'll get that back by daylight. And on land every one of the three services is under arms. On this coast alone before sunrise we'll have one hundred thousand ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... nest and was watching it and him—watching him with no agreeable or timid expression in its angry eyes. He was just expecting Victor Hugo's devil fish to complete his horror when a sudden, sharp, bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel or marine torpedo. This was a real and sensible danger, and as he struggled to ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the spongy substance gave way, the treacherous quicksand, with its smooth, tenacious throat-clutch, slid down and caught him. The danger was real and imminent, when his companions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Choof-choof-choof! came the Torpedo Destroyer behind us, and I wrapped the reins around my wrist, in case Parsifal should get uneasy and want to print horseshoes all ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... story of the "Torpedo Plan" and of Capt. Lance's heroic part in America's last mighty battle with the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... naval architect named DUNKIN claims to have constructed a new style of vessel, impervious to rams, shell, or shot." Now, then, where is our friend, Captain ERICSSON? The Captain has a torpedo which he is anxious to explode, near a strong vessel belonging to somebody else. He says it will blow up anything. DUNIN says nothing can blow up his vessel. A contest between these very positive inventors would be a positive ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... a pity, tho, that the fight didn't test our naval armaments better. It didn't prove anything. If we'd only used our torpedo-boats, and they'd got out their torpedo-boat destroyers, and then we'd had some ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... "let's decide what shape we want to use. As designer, I'd like to point out that a sphere is the strongest, a cube easiest to build, and a torpedo shape the most efficient aerodynamically. However, we intend to use it in space, ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... flag-ship of the second squadron has just sent out an order for its first division to prepare for an emergency signal drill. And the first division are to have a torpedo drill at the same time. Wait—in half a minute it ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... of which was larger than the rest. The smaller ones were about eight inches long. All were torpedo-shaped, but had flattened bottoms, which enabled them to stand upright. Two of the smaller ones were empty and unstoppered, the others contained a colourless liquid, and possessed queer-looking, nozzle-like stoppers that were connected by a thin metal rod with a catch halfway down ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... translucent surface of the harbor were scattered a dozen or more war-ships of the North Atlantic Squadron, ranging in size from the huge, double-turreted monitor Puritan to the diminutive but dangerous-looking torpedo-boat Dupont. All were in their war-paint of dirty leaden gray, which, although it might add to their effectiveness, certainly did not seem to me to improve their appearance as component parts of an ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... the signal for a flotilla of torpedo boats to enter the harbor of Port Arthur and blow up the ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... and do it to her; but that there gunboat's got heavy steel plates right round her, going ever so deep, and they'd be rather too much for my tools. They'd spoil every auger I've got. The skipper hasn't got a torpedo aboard, has he? One of them new 'uns that you winds up and sets a-going with a little screw-propeller somewheres astern, and a head full of nitro— what-d'ye-call-it, which goes off when ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... and leaped; cross-currents boiled out from projecting irregularities in the walls; here and there the waters tumbled madly and flung wet arms aloft, while up out of the gorge came a mighty murmur, redoubled by the echoing cliffs. A log came plunging through and it moved with the speed of a torpedo. Phillips watched it, fascinated. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... cause is the acquisition by the flotilla of battle power. It is a feature of naval warfare that is entirely new.[10] For all practical purposes it was unknown until the full development of the mobile torpedo. It is true that the fireship as originally conceived was regarded as having something of the same power. During the Dutch wars—the heyday of its vogue—its assigned power was on some occasions actually ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... French. The building of armored battle ships has been followed by the construction of small swift vessels from which to launch torpedoes at the battle ships. Other swift vessels have been constructed to pursue and destroy the torpedo boat. High explosives and smokeless ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... move himself in bed without luminous corruscations. Such may have been the case of those people, who have been related to have taken fire spontaneously, and to have been reduced to ashes. The electric concussion from the gymnotus electricus, and torpedo, are other instances of the power of the animal system to accumulate electricity, as in these it is used as a weapon of defence, or for the purpose of taking ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... has gone into such matters deeply, paying Mr. Brennan over half a million dollars for his torpedo invention. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... 'You are right, I must be in the wrong. It is very cold...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up. It was indeed cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... you, Gerald, she's a dandy," said Jim, after the boys had shaken hands and made a few formal inquiries about the interval which had elapsed since last they met. As Jim spoke, his eye roamed over the long torpedo body of ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... a torpedo-boat at the Havre at this moment. A telegram from me will bring her to the Needle ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... originality. "The Socratic dialectics, clearing away," says Grote, [Footnote: Grote, part ii. ch. 68; Maurice, Ancient Philosophy, p. 119.] "from the mind its mist of fancied knowledge, and, laying bare the real ignorance, produced an immediate effect like the touch of the torpedo; the newly created consciousness of ignorance was humiliating and painful, yet it was combined with a yearning after truth never before experienced. Such intellectual quickening, which could never commence until the mind had been disabused of its original illusion of false knowledge, was considered ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... which was thrown into the struggle in increasing numbers, represented an entirely new development, for the submarine is a vessel which can travel unseen beneath the water and, while still unseen, except for a possible momentary glimpse of a few inches of periscope, can launch a torpedo at long or short range and with deadly accuracy. In these circumstances it became imperative to organize the Admiralty administration to meet new needs, and to press into the service of the central administration a large number of officers charged with ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... steel twelve inches thick. One gun in each turret and the guns could swing around on four-fifths of the circle, so that every gun could be brought to bear on an enemy either to port or starboard. No other guns were carried in time of war and no cruisers, torpedo boats, or torpedoes were used, for experience in war had shown that they were useless waste of men and money. The battleship was propelled by rotary engines developing fifty thousand horsepower, driving the ship at a sustained ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... regarding him anxiously. That decided him. With a crashing bellow of rage and a sweep of his powerful tail he darted at the inoffensive head. But it vanished instantly, and a sudden tremendous turmoil, developing into a wake that lengthened out with the speed of a torpedo-boat, showed him the hopelessness of pursuit. Turning abruptly, he swam back to the shore and sulkily withdrew into the thickets to seek ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... stocks a vessel of an altogether novel design, and this latest addition to his miniature navy had cost him a great many hours of work and the exercise of no small amount of patience before it could be pronounced ready for use. It was said to be a "torpedo-boat destroyer," and was constructed out of the hull of an old tin boat. Her engines had once formed the motive power of a clockwork locomotive, but they had now been adapted to marine requirements, and made to ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... "his old brag and ostentation have caught these fools! I wonder where his vessel is? If I could fire a torpedo under it and send them all where young Jack and the other boy have gone to, I shouldn't have a dull moment for ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... which was gradually tapered towards the stern. A different material was also used, varnished silk being tried as an experiment. The envelope was attached to a keel on which was mounted the engine, a 35 horse-power Anzani, driving two swivelling four-bladed propellers. From the keel was suspended a torpedo-shaped boat car in which a crew of two was accommodated. Originally a vertical fin and rudder were mounted at the stern end of the keel, but these were later replaced by fins on the stern ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... Why do they call the Colodia and her sister ships 'torpedo boat destroyers'? We don't see many torpedo boats anyway. They are ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... claw around more than usual, made the whale land-sick. A whale can throw a stream from its snout for about five rods, but when it strikes land that way under heavy ballast it chucks all its load, water and solids, like a torpedo hitting a ship. I have experimented with small whales—say from ten to twenty feet over all, and never knew one to miss when he bumped land. The whale was prepared especially to do that—to release Jonah, and does it with wonderful automatic ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... present issue, on page 9948, we give illustrations of two torpedo boats, the Azor and Halcon, which have lately been constructed by Messrs Yarrow & Co., of Poplar, for the Spanish government. They are 135 ft. in length by 14 ft. beam, being of the same dimensions as No. 80 torpedo boat, lately completed by the above firm for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... off and they were in the middle of the canal. The Mungana had passed it. It was in a line with Alan's head. Oh Heavens! a sudden smother of foam, a rush like that of a torpedo, and set low down between two curving waves, a flash of gold. Then a gurgling, inhuman laugh and a weight upon his back. Down went Alan, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... more the natural organ of the torpedo, or of the electrical eel, than the Leyden Phial or the ordinary electric batteries, I may ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... There's war there as there is on land in Germany. Nobody tries to get goods through on land on the continent, and they make no complaints that commerce is stopped. Everybody tries to ply the Channel and the North Sea as usual, both of which have German and English mines and torpedo craft and submarines almost as thick as batteries along the hostile camps on land. The British Government (which now issues marine insurance) will not insure a British boat to carry food to Holland en route to the starving ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... bewildering. Finally, he dreamed that the rebel assumed the offensive, and one day he met him in the street, carrying in his hand something that looked like a lump of coal, which he threw at Frank. It proved, however, to be a torpedo, for it exploded with a loud report, and as Frank sprang over a fence that ran close by the sidewalk, to escape, he came violently in contact with the walls of a house. At this stage of his dream he was suddenly awakened. To his no small amazement, he found himself stretched ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... cottages, and churches. Lord Keith had the sense to laugh at all that stuff, but he had not the grand mechanical powers which have now enabled the human race, not to go, but to send one another to the stars. A clumsy affair called a catamaran, the acephalous ancestor of the torpedo, was expected to relieve the sea of some thousands of people who had no business there. This catamaran was a water-proof box about twenty feet long, and four feet wide, narrowed at the ends, like ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... other man," Bill declared promptly. "Positively! Everybody ought to know that. He invented a device so that they could smell a German submarine half a mile away, and they could tell when a torpedo was fired. Another invention turned a ship about with her prow facing the torpedo, so that it would be most likely to go plowing and not hit her, as it would with broadside on. I guess that saved many a ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... Type Torpedo Boat.—The fastest type of British torpedo boat, constructed by Messrs. Yarrow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... this while the land was full of garrisons, the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity of a Levanter, Paul skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a draught of old ocean, and making sad ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... a great deal; of those who knew all to betray nothing; and of those who were kept in ignorance to strain a fact out of the conflicting innuendos the general mystification waxed apace, and was at its height, when a name struck on Evan's ear that went through his blood like a touch of the torpedo. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... home, "if we admit that the plotters have conspired to sink a British battleship at Malta, the easiest way in war-time, when unidentified strangers cannot get aboard a warship, would be to effect the sinking by means of a submarine's torpedo. And, if this be the plan of the plotters, then the crime is likely to be attempted only when there are British and American war craft, and none others, in ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... afraid to make anything like a positive statement as to the heights achieved by some of the monsters, but it really appeared to me that a few of them rose nearly, if not quite, five and twenty feet into the air, descending again with a splash which reminded me of some of the torpedo experiments I had witnessed when staying for ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... old subterfuge? When he first saw the great ship sailing up in the sunshine, its decks crowded with peaceful passengers, and he rose like a murderer out of his hiding-place in the bowels of the sea, what were the feelings with which he ordered the torpedo to be fired? When, having launched his bolt, he sank and then rose again, and heard the drowning cries of his victims struggling in the water, what were the emotions with which he ran away? And when he returned to tell his story of the work ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... left New York harbor. This conjunction was bound to appear intentional rather than fortuitous, and even to-day the majority of Americans believe that I must have known beforehand of the design to torpedo the Lusitania. ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... further advantage of rendering it easier to put the port of Havre quickly in defense. A certain number of floating batteries, anchored behind the breakwaters and protecting the advances of torpedo boats by means of their firing, would make a formidable defense. Not having to perform any evolutions, they might without danger be invested with armor plate thicker than that of ordinary ironclads. In order to complete ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... the reasons of the latter phenomenon consists in the torpedo effect of what we may call, under the circumstances, the difference of ranks. The schoolmaster is a despot to his scholar; for every man is a despot, who delivers his judgment from the single impulse of his own will. The boy answers his questioner, as Dolon answers Ulysses in the Iliad, at the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... trouble be? 4. Draw a picture to show the parts of your left ear, and name each part. 5. How do you take care of your ears? 6. Comment on doing each of these things:—firing a bean shooter at anyone; throwing gravel or sand; firing off a cap or torpedo close to some one's head; boxing a person on the ear; running a nail cleaner or pencil point into your ear; putting on the baby's cap so that the ears are folded forward; asking your teacher to repeat her ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... leaned steeply to port with a forward crank, her two starboard screws, now free, spinning asleep like humming-tops. A six-inch shell, beautifully aimed, had shattered her engines, killing two stokers, and a torpedo-mine had knocked a hole nine feet ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... had it been taken from him, or had he himself passed it on into another's keeping? There were a few incidents that strengthened the possibility of the latter theory. After the torpedo struck the ship, in the few moments during the launching of the boats, Danvers was seen speaking to a young American girl. No one actually saw him pass anything to her, but he might have done so. It seems to me quite likely that ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... in the empty and useless formality of blockading his antagonist, but assisted the British army on the Niagara frontier till navigation closed, about Nov. 21st. A couple of days before, Midshipman McGowan headed an expedition to blow up the two-decker (named the St. Lawrence) with a torpedo, but was discovered by two of the enemy's boats, which he captured and brought in; the attempt was abandoned, because the St. Lawrence was found not ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... solemnly entered the room in his stocking feet and carrying a pillow which he placed on his chair before sitting down. "What new monkey shine is that?" growled old Botts. "S-s-s-h, pa," said Johnny anxiously; "I was playing fireworks with Billy Simson this afternoon and I swallowed a torpedo." "Did, eh?" "Yes, and if anything should touch me kinder hard I might go off and ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... circulated, I know not with what authenticity, that Johnson considered Dr. Birch as a dull writer, and said of him, 'Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties[465].' That the literature of this country is much indebted to Birch's activity and diligence must certainly be acknowledged. We have seen that Johnson honoured him with a Greek Epigram[466]; and his correspondence with him, during many years, proves ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... a thousand pairs of eyes swept the horizon, and the intervening spaces of tossing, blue-grey water, for the sight of a sinister periscope, or for the smudge of a friendly cruiser, and when night fell, a thousand pairs of ears listened with strained intentness for the impact of the deadly torpedo or for the signal ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... tried a new plan. We used a 'go-devil-squib.' That's a sort of torpedo, holding about a quart of the glycerine, and it has a firing head of its own. We drop that down the pipe and when it hits on the top cannister it goes off, and sets off the rest of the explosive. But, ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... and directly under the colors. The men scattered, and a piece of old cloth was seen lying on the ground at the point from which the report emanated. Colonel McKean, who was very near, lifted the cloth with the point of his sword, and discovered a torpedo carefully buried in the ground, except a nipple which had been filled with fulminating powder, which was covered by the old cloth. The fuse only had exploded. Had the machine itself exploded, it must have destroyed many ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... now hear of nothing but smokeless powder and small bore rifles, heavy ironclads and swift cruisers, torpedo boats and dynamite guns. Europe seems hastening on to that time foretold by General Grant when, worn out by a fatal and ruinous policy, she will bow to the supremacy of peace-loving America, and learn anew from her ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... gardening on a summer afternoon, you may look very fetching, if you are nineteen, and the right sex for the adjective. Miss Sally did, being both, and for our own part we think it was inconsiderate and thoughtless of cook. Sally was sprung upon that young man like a torpedo on a ship with no guards out, saying with fascinating geniality through a smile (as one interests oneself in a civility that means nothing) that Mr. Fenwick had just gone out, and she didn't know when he would be back. But why not ask Mrs. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the forts guarding the entrance to the bay, also in the subsequent fierce encounters with a huge Confederate "ram" and gun-boats. At the beginning of the latter encounters one of Farragut's best iron-clads (the Tecumseh) was sunk in a few seconds by a torpedo exploded under her, when all but seventeen of her one hundred and thirty men perished. Undismayed, Farragut pushed on, won a victory, and permanently closed the port of Mobile. When the Tecumseh went to the bottom the Admiral prayed for ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and ardent boy in these impressionable years. He soon got to be keenly interested in the Navy, amassed a surprising amount of information about the types, engine strength and gun-power of the principal warships, and found delight in making models of cruisers and torpedo-boats. The Army in those days made no appeal to him, though he was familiar with military sights and sounds—the ceremonious displays that take place from time to time in a garrison town, bugles blowing, the crunch of feet on the gravel in the barrack square, and the tramp, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... man; but when the Italian had bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well, or the derrick wouldn't look quite so ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to the teleceiver screen. To their horror, they saw a menacing shape blasting toward them. They recognized it instantly—a space torpedo! ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... or the poor man would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it,—which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning, to such a wretched, paralyzing torpedo of a task as my ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... off Mobile bar August 1, where all was expectancy and preparation for the coming fight, a fight which perhaps had more in it of dramatic interest than any other naval battle of the war. The wooden ships pushing into the bay through the torpedo-strewn channel and under the fierce storm of shot and shell from Fort Morgan, lashed together in pairs for mutual support in case of disaster; the sudden and tragic sinking of the Tecumseh by torpedo stroke, with the loss of the heroic Craven and ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some royal house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home to enlist. In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone, we ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow roadstead between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer sidled up and took a ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... latter half of 1803 he repaired to England, and later on to the United States, and after the year 1803 he seems to have had neither the will nor the opportunity to serve Napoleon. In England he offered his torpedo patent to the English Admiralty, expressing his hatred of the French Emperor as a "wild beast who ought to be hunted down." Little was done with the torpedo in England, except to blow up a vessel off Walmer as a proof of what it could do. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... her credit there are: A bust of her royal highness the Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein; Mr. Gladstone, in marble and bronze; G. F. Watts, in bronze, for the 'Permanent Manchester Art Exhibition'; Mr. Peter Brotherhood, inventor of a torpedo engine, in marble and bronze, which held the place of honor at the Royal Academy the year of its exhibition; Princess Henry of Prussia, in marble; her highness Princess Helena of Saxe-Altenburg; his excellency the Baron von ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... when the clouds form almost a solid flooring, one feels very much at sea, and wonders if one is in the navy instead of aviation. The diminutive Nieuports skirt the white expanse like torpedo boats in an arctic sea, and sometimes, far across the cloud-waves, one sights an enemy escadrille, moving ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... other philosophers; and Mr. Wilcke, a celebrated electrician, believed them to be electric. Lin. Spec. Plantar. p. 490. Swedish Acts for the year 1762. Pulteney's View of Linneus, p. 220. Nor is this more wonderful than that the electric eel and torpedo should give voluntary shocks of electricity; and in this plant perhaps, as in those animals, it may be a mode of defence, by which it harrasses or destroys the night-flying insects which infest it; and probably it may emit the same sparks ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Atlantic Fleets.—Before long a Spanish fleet of four new, fast armored cruisers and three large sea-going torpedo-boat destroyers appeared in the West Indies. The Spanish admiral did not seem to know exactly where to go. But after sailing around the Caribbean Sea for a time, he anchored in Santiago harbor—on the southern coast of Cuba. In the American navy there were only two fast armored cruisers, the New ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... quadrant; whether Hulls or Fulton was the father of the steamboat; whether steamboats were first used in England or America; and whether Fulton should have offered his invention of the submarine torpedo to France as well as to England. One may easily say at the present time that the national spirit should have risen superior to such trivialities; but the national spirit was taking a most provincial cast. Originality was claimed for everything; inheritance ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... been sucked under by a comber had not Captain Holt grapped him by the collar and landed him on his feet again. Now and then a roller more vicious than the others would hurl a log of wood straight at the cart with the velocity of a torpedo, and swoop back again, the log missing ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... added, "We don't know what we've got here, but it's not a natural body. Could be anything from a torpedo ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and—"Now—for Kaiser and fatherland!"—by means of an image thrown on a screen from the periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Zero, brightening, 'a torpedo in the Thames! Superb, dear fellow! I recognise in you the marks of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... This was the way in which they got their name. Navies had small gunboats before torpedoes were used. Then they had torpedo-boats. Then they built torpedo-gunboats. Finally, they built boats big enough to destroy gunboats, torpedo-boats, and torpedo-gunboats, without, however, losing the handy use of guns and torpedoes in vessels much ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... ingenuity to build increasingly powerful aggressive weapons, it was possible that, unknown to the rest of the world, some nation could have been testing such a fearsome machine. The Chassepot rifle led to the torpedo, and the torpedo has led to this underwater battering ram, which in turn will lead to the world putting its foot down. At least I hope ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... am to tired to wright ennything. i never had so much fun in my life. i only got burned 5 times. 1 snapcracker went off rite in my face and i coodent see ennything til mother washed my eyes out. Zee Smith fired a torpedo and a peace of it flew rite in the corner of my eye and made a blew spot there. i fired every one of my snapcrackers. it ...
— The Real Diary of a Real Boy • Henry A. Shute
... complete chart and assigned a certain area which he is to explore. Remember, gentlemen, that this first major expedition is to be purely one of exploration; the one of conquest will set out after you have returned with complete information. You will each report by torpedo every tenth of the year. We do not anticipate any serious difficulty, as we are of course the highest type of life in the Universe; nevertheless, in the unlikely event of trouble, report it. We shall do the rest. In conclusion, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... to press bids fair to cost immeasurably more aintenance of armies upon a peace-footing-the feeding and clothing of the men, the building and maintenance of barracks and forts, of battleships and torpedo boats, of guns and ammunition, automobiles, aeroplanes, and the increasing list of expensive modern military appurtenances. Europe spends nearly two billion dollars a year in times of peace on its armies and navies-money enough to build four or five Panama canals annually. The entire merchant ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... cut in two in order that half of it might be drawn to the top at a time. Rear Brakeman Joe was left to guard the part of the train that remained behind, and he did this by walking back a few hundred yards along the track, and placing a torpedo on top of one of the rails. Then he went back as much farther and placed two torpedoes, one a ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... at the time, with its top hat on and its smile still undisturbed. Across the English Channel three days later the Dutch steam packet Princess Juliana carried us safely through mine fields and between lanes of British torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers. We landed on the Continent at Flushing. Thence we headed for The Hague, Holland, the neutral gateway of northern Europe, where we found the American Minister, Dr. Henry van Dyke, and his first secretary, Marshall Langhorne, ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... There is nothing mean about the British public. "What are a few bales of gun-cotton,' it cries—" a few tons of paltry bullets, in comparison with the march of civilisation and humanity and open markets? We do but give them of our best, our finest Bessemer steel, our latest thing in torpedo-boats—nothing is too good for them. What are we, if not magnanimous?' says the British public. I always like that about it—it never grudges a few millions for war expenditure in the cause of philanthropy! Considering how very sharply it looks after its L s. d. in other directions, this ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... noticed two British torpedo boat destroyers, one to starboard, the other on the port bow, apparently keeping pace with the Volhynia. They were still there at noon, subjects of speculation among the passengers; and at tea-time their number was increased to five, the three ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of the famous Ten Thousand, attempts a definition of virtue itself, the principle that underlies specific kinds of virtues such as justice. After a cross-examination he confesses his helplessness in a famous simile: Socrates is like the torpedo-fish which benumbs all who touch it. Then the real business begins. How do we learn anything at all? Socrates says by Reminiscence, for the soul lived once in the presence of the ideal world; when it enters the flesh it loses its knowledge, but ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... little torpedo-boat would cut like a knife-blade through the water on messenger service; or a gunboat would drop lightly down the hill of the sea, along the top of which it patrolled so vigilantly; and ever on ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... of life as one of the varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action by the living being—animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes—one of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... will tow your boat maybe fifteen miles; that is to say, he partly tows the boat, but the heavy motor launch must also use its power to keep up or the line will at once be snapped. The tuna belongs to the mackerel family, is built like a white-head torpedo, and for gameness, speed and endurance is hard to beat. Only the pala of the South Pacific Seas, also a mackerel, may, according to Louis Becke, be his rival. Becke indeed claims it to be the gamest of all fish. But its manoeuvres are different from a tuna's and similar to those of the tarpon. ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... Were greased with blood. They swept the seas For England; and—we reap the fruits Of their heroic deviltries! Our creed is in the cold machine, The inhuman devildoms of brain, The bolt that splits the midnight main, Loosed at a lever's touch; the lean Torpedo; "Twenty Miles of Power"; The steel-clad Dreadnoughts' dark array! Yet ... we that keep the conning tower Are not so strong as they Whose watchword ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... was a passenger entered the northwest passage of Key West Harbor, and was headed towards the quaint island city that had been brought into such sudden prominence by the war. The port was filled with United States cruisers, gun-boats, yachts converted into torpedo-boat destroyers, Government hospital-ships, and others flying the flag of the Red Cross Society, transports, colliers, supply-ships, water-boats, and a huddle of prizes—steamers and sailing-vessels captured off the Cuban coast. Amid these the Speedy slowly threaded her ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... of Socrates has the effect of a torpedo's shock upon him. When he talks with other persons he has plenty to say about virtue; in the presence of Socrates, his thoughts desert him. Socrates replies that he is only the cause of perplexity in others, because he is himself perplexed. He ...
— Meno • Plato
... steaming radius is about 50,000 miles, depending upon the speed. She carries twelve 16-inch guns, twenty-two 6-inch guns, sixteen 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, eight 3-pounders, four rapid-fire guns, six aerial torpedo tubes, and six bomb droppers, which can simultaneously discharge tons of explosives. She has a complement of 1400 officers and men. She required three years and eight months to build at a cost of $10,000,000. In action her entire ship's company is protected ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his hurricane deck. But McManus's simile must be the torpedo. He glided in under the guns and slipped a scant three inches of knife blade between the ribs of the Mulberry Hill cruiser. Meanwhile Brick Cleary, a devotee to strategy, had skimmed across the lunch counter and thrown the switch of the electrics, leaving the combat to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... not remind me of that, mother. I have hardly ever opened a newspaper in my life without seeing our name in it. The Undershaft torpedo! The Undershaft quick firers! The Undershaft ten inch! the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun! the Undershaft submarine! and now the Undershaft aerial battleship! At Harrow they called me the Woolwich Infant. At Cambridge it was the same. A little brute at King's ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Castellan, were standing round a great glass tank, twenty-five feet long, and fifteen broad, supported on a series of trestles. The tank was filled with water up to within about six inches of the upper edge. The depth was ten feet. A dozen models of battleships, cruisers and torpedo craft were floating on the surface of the water. Five feet under the surface, a grey, fish-shaped craft with tail and fins, almost exactly resembling those of a flying fish, was darting about, now jumping forward like a cat pouncing on a bird, now drawing back, and then suddenly coming ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... railway speed. The older boys munched steadily and easily, while Bud and Bobby pecked intermittently in short nibbles. Amarilly had the "star method," which they all vainly tried to emulate. At short and regular intervals a torpedo-like report issued from the gum as she snapped her teeth down upon it. Cory kept hers strung out elastically from her ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... nothing to his wife. Even from the grave he would hold a shadowy yet not impotent rod over her and her family! Lady Ann suspected something of the sort, and spent every moment safe from his possible appearance, in searching for some such hidden torpedo. But there was one thing of which sir Wilton took better care than of his honour—and that was his bunch ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... upon the stage in fitting scenes, keeps to the text and the impersonations which right principle and pure taste assign him. His grimaces are not for the church. He may not sing his catches when penitent souls are listening to the "Miserere," drop his torpedo-puns when life's mystery and solemnity are pressed heavily upon the soul,—be irreverent, profane, or vulgar. He must know and keep his place. But he should have his place, and have it confessed; and that place is not quite at the end of the procession of the benefactors of the race. Punch, as we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... prospective Antarctic expedition, and on the following day he called upon Sir Clements and volunteered to command it. Of this eventful visit Sir Clements wrote: 'On June 5, 1899, there was a remarkable coincidence. Scott was then torpedo lieutenant of the Majestic. I was just sitting down to write to my old friend Captain Egerton[1] about him, when he was announced. He came to volunteer to command the expedition. I believed him to be the best man for so ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... Ferminard at home, in an apartment smelling of garlic and the south. Ferminard, a tall, black-bearded creature, with a glittering eye; a brigand from the Rhone Valley who had flung himself into the politics of his country as a torpedo flings itself into the sea, greeted Adams with effusion, when he read Pugin's card; gave him cigarettes, and shut the open window in honour of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... shell. Everything thinner has been punctured, and now an eighty-ton gun, to cost sixty thousand pounds, is getting ready to perforate that. There must be a stopping-point for all this somewhere. Perhaps the fate of armor afloat may soon be settled finally by the torpedo, as its efficiency on land was disposed of by the bullet, and the men-at-arms of the sea no longer lord it over hosts of wooden yeomanry. Happy the nation that can look on with its hands firmly in its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to—where ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... even supplied power for a miniature searchlight. It was Bones who had her painted Service grey, and would have added another funnel if Hamilton had not detected the attempted aggrandizement. Bones claimed that she was dustproof, waterproof, and torpedo-proof, and Hamilton had voiced his regret that ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... found the bay full of shipping. Four large transports were already engaged in the work of embarkation, and another arrived after we did. The warships presented a gallant array, twelve in all, belonging, with two or three exceptions, to the North Coast Squadron. There were four torpedo-boats in addition. The most powerful vessels were the Chen-Yuen and the Ting-Yuen, barbette ships, English-built, I think, of 7280 tons. The King-Yuen and Lai-Yuen were two barbette ships of smaller tonnage—2850. Then came the ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... anti-British feeling, and it was said that her activity in running up earthworks and apparently impregnable fortifications was in anticipation of Disraeli declaring war and ordering the fleet to bombard the Crimean ports; hence, too, in addition to the strong fortifications, torpedo mines were laid for miles along the seaboard, and every possible means and opportunity were taken to make it widely known that the Black Sea was one deadly mine-field. The Press on all sides was, as usual, brimful of reports of the most alarmist nature—these, of course, for the most ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... construction of an experimental ship. This ship, the Turbinia, after a considerable amount of trial and modification, attained the unprecedented speed of 341/2 knots an hour, and His Majesty's navy has possessed, in the Turbinia's younger and greater sister, the Viper, now unhappily lost, a torpedo-destroyer capable of 41 miles an hour. There can be little doubt that the sea speeds of 50 and even 60 miles an hour will be attained within the next few years. But I do not think that these developments will do more than delay the advent of the "explosive" or "storage ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 4, 1916, the Russians made an attempt to cross the Dvina near Deveten, a few miles northwest of Dvinsk, but were repulsed. Another similar undertaking, attempted August 8, 1916, east of Friedrichstadt, met the same fate. On that day German batteries successfully bombarded Russian torpedo boats and other vessels lying off the coast of Kurland and forced them ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... replied Henry. "And this is how it came about. When I read of the leak in the navy's secrets and the attempts of the Germans to torpedo our transports, I wrote to Captain Hardy about it. I told him we could be just as useful catching German spies in New York as we were in Pennsylvania. He answered and said he didn't think we could be of any ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... helped to bring about this consummation more speedily. The firing of a bomb or of a torpedo from an aerial war engine often accomplished in an hour what could not have been accomplished, a few years before, under months, often ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... been waited for, and the arrangements sailed in secret, and the news was known in American cities scarcely any sooner than it was in France, so careful had the military authorities been not to give the lurking German submarines a chance to torpedo the transports. ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... be in attendance with Admiral Sir Charles Hotham as Commander-in-Chief. Besides a number of Foreign warships, which were specially sent to participate in the function, the British battle-ships numbered twenty-one, the cruisers twenty-six, the torpedo gun-boats seventeen, the torpedo boat destroyers twenty-eight and the sea-going training vessels ten. Amongst the Foreign contributors to the Review were Germany, the United States, Russia, Sweden and Norway, Denmark, Greece, ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... his vigilance. Observing every precaution when he left The Chancery Agency, he spent the intervening time at one of his clubs, from which, having made an early dinner, he set off for Pall Mall at ten minutes to seven. A rakish-looking gray car resembling a giant torpedo was approaching slowly from the direction of Buckingham Palace. The driver pulled up as Paul Harley stepped into the road, and following a brief conversation Harley set out westward, performing a detour before heading south for Lower Claybury, a little town with which ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... afternoon at this final test, and all in, too, but at last I brought him near enough for Captain Dan to grasp the leader.... Then there was something doing around that boat for a spell! I was positive a German torpedo had hit us. But the explosion was only the swordfish's tail and Dan's voice yelling for another gaff. When Captain Dan got the second gaff in him there was another submarine attack, but the boat ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... dream, she hears the talk Of mine, torpedo, bomb and gun— She shudders, but her thoughts are all Encradled with ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... glowing, bluish metal. It was a small thing, scarcely half the size of Roal. From it curled three thin tentacles of the same bluish metal. Suddenly the generators within F-1 seemed to roar into life. An enormous aura of white light surrounded the small torpedo of metal, and it was shot through with crackling streamers of blue lightning. Lightning cracked and roared from F-1 to the ground near him, and to one machine which had come too close. Suddenly, there was a dull snap, and F-1 fell heavily to the floor, and beside him fell ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... "I should think so! Why, Rupert, our woods were full of squirrels. Such dear little things!—you never saw such pretty squirrels. One of them got so tamed that he used to eat out of my hand. His name was Torpedo. I named him myself. Then there was Beppo, the dearest dog! I wish you knew him. We used to run races and have the greatest fun. And Aunty and I had nice times going ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... the enemy, whose fire opened briskly; but the masts being out, it was not easy to distinguish the vessels from the hulks. The Pinola struck the third from the eastern shore and her men jumped on board. The intention was to explode two charges of powder with a slow match over the chains, and a torpedo by electricity under the bows of the hulk, a petard operator being on board. The charges were placed, and the Pinola cast off. The operator claims that he asked Bell to drop astern by a hawser, but that instead of so doing, he let go and backed the engines. Be this as it may, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... in for repair was due to go out this morning. She was ready for sea the night before, the officers and crew had all come back from short leave, and the working parties had cleared out. Then in the middle watch, when the torpedo lieutenant was testing the circuits, it was discovered that all the cables leading to the guns had been cut. Dawson has been called in, and bids me say that, if you can come down, now is the chance of your life. I ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... swung all his weight and muscle on the left rein. The team and cart swerved that way and crashed like a torpedo into the pillar. The men on the cart went flying like skittles. The driver's strap burst, the pillar rang with the shock, and John Byrnes fell on the car track with a broken shoulder twenty feet away, while Erebus—beautiful, raven-black, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... negotiations the patience of the Government at Tokio was exhausted. On Feb. 8, 1904, the Japanese fleet made a sudden descent upon Port Arthur. This act, so audaciously planned, resulted in the destruction of battle-ships, cruisers, torpedo-boats—nine in all—to which were added the day following two more battle-ships, destroyed ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... before me the often mooted question raised by the sentimentalists and humanitarians concerning the horrors of war. Not long after this time, the papers - the sentimentalist papers - were furious with Lord Dundonald for suggesting the adoption by the Navy of a torpedo which he himself, I think, had invented. The bare idea of such wholesale slaughter was revolting to a Christian world. He probably did not see much difference between sinking a ship with a torpedo, and firing a shell into her magazine; and likely ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... found that amber when rubbed would attract certain light substances, and the ancient philosophers and doctors had discovered the value of an electric shock from a torpedo in rheumatic complaints; that sparks would follow the rubbing of the fur of animals in cold air had also been noticed, but of magnetism, and of electricity, which is a current of magnetism, the world was ignorant, except as to some of its ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... realizes that annexation will necessitate a largely increased navy, and Secretary Long will ask Congress to arrange for the building of more cruisers and torpedo-boats. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 38, July 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... deg. to 100 deg. C. decomposes slowly, and sunlight causes it to undergo a slow decomposition. It can, however, be preserved for years without undergoing any alteration. It is very susceptible to explosions by influence. For instance, a torpedo, even placed at a long distance, may explode a line of torpedoes charged with gun-cotton. The velocity of the propagation of the explosion in metallic tubes filled with pulverised gun-cotton has been found to be ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... next to the Zeppelin air ship, M. Santos Dumont's balloon was probably attracting most of the attention of experts. The account given of this air vessel by the Daily Express was somewhat startling. The balloon proper was compared to a large torpedo. Three feet beneath this hangs the gasoline motor which is to supply the power. The propeller is 12 feet in diameter, and is revolved so rapidly by the motor that the engine frequently gets red hot. The only accommodation for the ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... grotto, hero, innuendo, motto, mosquito, mulatto, negro, portico (oes or os), potato, tornado, torpedo, veto, volcano. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... powerful pivot-gun, that one of McClellan's shells struck during the first day's bombardment, and split it into fragments. At Gloucester Point, across the York river, the great guns of the Merrimac were planted, it is said, and a fleet of fire-rafts and torpedo-ships were moored in the stream. By all accounts, there could have been no less than five hundred guns behind the Confederate entrenchments, the greater portion, of course, field-pieces, and, as the defending army was ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Russian warships on the 26th of last April, should have given the enemy matter for reflection. Although allowed an hour's time for consideration, the soldiers refused to surrender, and opened fire with their rifles on the battleships. Then, before the Kinshu Maru was blown in two by a torpedo, a number of the Japanese officers and men performed harakiri.... This strong display of the fierce old feudal spirit suggests how dearly a ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... his adversaries. After a duel with the Japanese "Matsushima," the Chinese flagship "Tingyuen" was severely damaged, and only saved from sinking by the intervention of her sister ship, the "Chenyuen." These two ironclads, together with the torpedo boats, succeeded in making their escape, but five of the Chinese vessels were sunk or destroyed. In men, the Chinese lost 700 killed or drowned and 300 wounded, while the Japanese lost 115 killed and 150 wounded. The result of this victory was that the Chinese never afterward attempted to dispute ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... fish here in tolerable quantities, especially when the smoothness of the water permitted us to hale the seyne. Amongst the rest, we got here cavallies, breams, mullets, soles, fiddle-fish, sea eggs, and lobsters; and here, and in no other place, met with that extraordinary fish called the Torpedo, or numbing fish, which is in shape very like the fiddle-fish, and is not to be known from it but by a brown circular spot of about the bigness of a crown-piece near the centre of its back; perhaps ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... tall, thin Italian Consular-clerk, speaking with a strong accent. "An English steam yacht ran aground on the Meloria about ten miles out, and was discovered by a fishing-boat who brought the news to harbor. The Admiral sent out two torpedo-boats, which managed after a lot of difficulty to bring in the yacht safely, but the Captain of the Port has a suspicion that the crew were trying to make ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... tons. The Leipzig, the Nuernberg, and the Dresden were light cruisers of about 3,500 tons. The armament of the larger vessels included eight 8.2-inch and six 6-inch guns. The smaller relied upon either ten or twelve 4-inch pieces. Each ship carried torpedo tubes, and the speed of each was about twenty-two or twenty-three knots an hour. The Dresden, however, could go to twenty-seven knots. The squadron possessed all-important allies. Several German merchant-marine companies, notably the Kosmos, plied along the Chilian ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... moved on toward a meeting place. The ship moved a trifle faster, because it was climbing. The speeds would match exactly when they met. The small torpedo-shaped shining ship and the bulging glowing metal satellite floated with a seeming vast deliberation in emptiness, while the most gigantic of possible round objects filled all the firmament beneath them. They were 200 miles apart. It seemed that the huge ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... Smokeless Powder.—This powder is manufactured at the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station for use in guns of all calibres in the U.S. Navy. It is a nitro-cellulose powder, a mixture of insoluble and soluble nitro- cellulose together with the nitrates of barium and potassium, and a small percentage of calcium carbonate. The proportions in the case of the powder for ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... faces of the passengers as they stampeded for their life-belts, though there was no panic. Nobs rose with a low growl. I rose, also, and over the ship's side, I saw not two hundred yards distant the periscope of a submarine, while racing toward the liner the wake of a torpedo was distinctly visible. We were aboard an American ship—which, of course, was not armed. We were entirely defenseless; yet without warning, we ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... emblazoned on the martyr-roll of heaven. It matters little if ungrateful men have forgotten them, and lauded the makers of mowing-machines, the inventors of steam-boats, the patented proprietors of the telegraph, the torpedo, the needle-gun, the steam engine, the sewing-machine, etc. All these things being of the earth earthy, shall pass away; nay, may become the civilized (?) instruments of driving the enlightened nations of the nineteenth century back into degraded barbarism. Have we not an undeniable proof of this ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... and the head simply widens out as one passes back to the body. The high resistance offered by water necessitates this tendency to a cigar or ship outline, just as it has determined the cigar shape of the ordinary fish torpedo. ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It's madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Might better have saved their powder and let us run into the fields and be blown to bits, you will say. Not at all. They would consider that a waste of good mines. Nobody wants to waste a whole mine on a poor little torpedo boat destroyer — and twenty to forty men. There's no profit ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... of temper. In the wooing days everyone is a lamb, and only becomes the howling wolf after marriage. Circumstances that ruffle the temper in the presence of the intended are but like the harmless squib, but would become like the explosive torpedo in his or her absence or in after-marriage. Quarreling caused by matrimonial differences is the most frequent cause of infelicity, and most of it is caused by an innate irate temper of ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... brightened as if by magic. And with equal suddenness there shot round the edge of the southern extremity of the cove, outlining itself against the red sky in the distance the long, low-lying hulk of a vessel—a dark, sinister-looking thing which I recognised at once as a torpedo-destroyer. It was coming along, about half a mile outside the bar, at a rare turn of speed which would, I knew, quickly carry it beyond our field of vision. And I was wondering whether from its decks the inside of the cove and the yawl lying ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... water, for it is there only they can learn their duties as they should be learned. The big vessels should be manoeuvred in squadrons containing not merely battle ships, but the necessary proportion of cruisers and scouts. The torpedo boats should be handled by the younger officers in such manner as will best fit the latter to take responsibility and meet ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... practice is to make the fleet ready for war, it must be carried out with the fleet in its war composition. All the different elements, battleships, cruisers, torpedo craft, and the rest, must be fully represented, otherwise the admiral would be practising in peace with a different instrument from that with which he would need to ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson |
