laststandonzombieisland

A pair of trained military marine mammals (that’s dolphin to you buddy) located a piece of lost naval ordnance off the coast of California near the US Navy Special Warfare base at Corondano.  Now the concept of the dolphin thing isn’t that hard to grasp, the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program  has been using them to find lost items at sea for going on sixty years. The thing is, it wound up being a Howell Torpedo from the 1890s. Which is pretty dope.

What the heck is a Howell Torpedo ?

Until this week this was the only survivor of Howell’s 50 Mk1 Locomotive torpedoes.

In 1883, when Congress appropriated funding to purchase automobile or self-propelled torpedoes, the Navy issued a public solicitation for concepts and to conduct a competitive evaluation. The specification required each competitor to build an experimental model at his own expense and demonstrate it to the Navy Torpedo Board for evaluation.

The Navy received three proposals. The American Torpedo Company and Asa Weeks both proposed surface-running, rocket-powered torpedoes. LCDR John Howell, USN, proposed an ingeniously designed flywheel-powered brass torpedo. Howell, a career navy man (USNA class of 1858), had encountered torpedoes first hand (actually submerged sea mines) at the Battle of Mobile Bay in 5 August 1864. His ship, the steam sloop USS Ossipee, with USS Itasca alongside, past the forts and entered Mobile Bay with Farragut and participated in the ensuing naval battle, playing a large role in the struggle with Tennessee which finally forced the well fought, heavy southern ironclad ram to surrender. During the battle Farragut gave his famous command of ‘Damned the Torpedoes, full speed ahead’ after the mighty ironclad monitor USS Tecumseh was sunk and Union sailors noticed mines floating all about the harbor.

Howell’s design, a 132-pound flywheel, spun up to 10,000 rpm by a steam turbine, provided the stored energy to move the torpedo through the water. This means of propulsion outperformed all others for the next thirty years. The flywheel also acted as a gyroscope, keeping the torpedo on its lateral course.

The torpedo was 11 feet long, 14 inches in diameter, and weighed about 500 lbs. It could be launched from either above water or submerged torpedo tubes. The Howell attained a speed of 26 knots for 400 yards with great accuracy. It could be set to maintain a desired depth and explode upon contact with its target. Now when you consider that in the 1880s, most ships were still sailing powered, and the steamers that were out there were coal-fired boiler driven vessels that would be doing good to break 16-knots, the Howell was lightning fast.

In 1886 Lieutenant Commander Barber of the Bureau of Ordnance testified before the Senate Committee on Ordnance and Warships:

“The Howell torpedo is the most valuable American locomotive torpedo that has yet been invented for naval use…Our government should take the necessary action to perfect it…Its principal advantages over the Whitehead are directive force, its size and its cost. Its remarkable power for maintaining the direction in which it is pointed, when acted upon by a deflecting force, makes it possible to launch it with accuracy from the broadside of a vessel in rapid motion, which in my opinion is the most practical method of using a torpedo at sea; no other torpedo presents the advantages in this respect that are possessed by the Howell…”

In 1888 the Navy selected the Howell torpedo as the first automobile torpedo for issue to the fleet. CDR Howell sold his design to the Hotchkiss Ordnance Company which in turn manufactured the 50 of the new Mark 1 Howell torpedo for the Navy at its plant in Provedence RI.

The Torpedo Boat USS Cushing carried the first Howell torpedoes…these ships led to Torpedo Boat Destroyers, which today are simply called Destroyers….

By 1892, U.S. Navy battleships mounted deck-mounted torpedo tubes to fire the Mark 1 Howell. When the Navy ordered its first operational torpedo boats (the Cushing Class), the Naval Torpedo Station, Newport, had the task of arming these new craft and training their crews to fire the Howell torpedo. By the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. Navy included operational seagoing torpedo boats that were the forerunners of modern fleet destroyers. During this war a division of the North Atlantic Squadron was commanded by then-Rear Admiral John Adams Howell.

With the relocation of the torpedo tubes to below the waterline, the Navy replaced the Howell torpedo with the Whitehead Torpedo Mark 1, 2, and 3 which did not require a flywheel. The Navy used the Howell for about 10 years and withdrew it about 1900.

This places the torpedo found as being expended at least 113 years ago, possibly older.

Not bad looking for spending more than a century in saltwater

You can see the distinctive tail shape of the all-brass bodied torp. Note the green patina.

It is only the second known Howell in existence today, the other one being an exceptionally well-preserved one on display at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Washington.

Howell died in 1918 at age 78 as a retired Rear Admiral.  At the time of his death, World War One was raging and the most common way to sink a ship was with a self-propelled torpedo, which had to bring the Civil War veteran a moment of  ” I told you so.'”

Today the “Howell Basin”, in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Cape Cod, and the “Howell Hook”, a submerged reef off the coast of southern Florida, are named in his honor, as the career officer had been involved in lots of survey work whenever he wasn’t fighting Rebels, Spaniards, or making underwater ordnance. All in all, he was pretty forward-looking.

…But I doubt he would have ever dreamed dolphins would recover one of his ‘damned torpedoes.’