Word: torpedoes
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Bushnell has also made several tests of his torpedo. It is a watertight oaken container, shaped like an egg and large enough to hold 150 pounds of gunpowder. The explosive can be detonated by a gunlock connected to a clock. Bushnell's plan is to have the Turtle attach the torpedo to an enemy warship by night and then escape before the explosion. At one demonstration of a model torpedo for Connecticut officials, Bushnell reported that the explosion produced "a very great effect, rending planks into pieces and casting stones, with a body of water, many feet into...
...flat and evil-looking fish, of the genus Torpedo lies quivering on a wet napkin. A wire extends from the napkin to a nearby basin of water. A man holds a finger in the basin and another finger in another basin. A second man holds one finger in the second basin and another finger in a third basin. And so on-until the eighth man, with his finger in the seventh basin, touches a wire to the back of the fish, a ray. Then, although none of the men is touching the fish or any other person, all of them...
...William Bryant of Trenton performed tests on a torpedo of Surinam and proved that it could send a shock "through metallic substances, like an old sword blade," but when the sword was "armed with sealing wax, the electric fluid would not pass...
...When Bryant's tests were reported to the American Philosophical Society, the A.P.S. formed a committee to arrange with the "owner of a torpedo or torporific eel [to] determine the nature of the shocks which it communicates." The offered price: ? 3. Physician Hugh Williamson later discovered, among other things, that the eel can stun fish at a distance, and "it can give a small shock, a severe one or not at all, just as circumstances may require...
...wood, with the shock organs made of pewter, but he was dissatisfied with the results, partly because the artificial fish gave off weaker shocks when submerged under water. Cavendish's conclusion was cautious: "On the whole, I think there seems nothing in the phenomena of the torpedo at all incompatible with electricity...