 Before I begin, I'd like to thank John, not only for his help, but also in volunteering to read the first copy of this book, a very big help when someone does that. Also Scott Riley, who's now at the Underwater and Naval Warfare Library, and Dara Baker of the Archives over here, very, very big help. The story you're about to hear has not been told in 150 years, and you're the first audience to understand it. So you won't know if I'm accurate or not, okay, so I can tell you anything. Now, this was so top secret, it's beyond top secret, at every stage of development, as every milestone was passed, papers, diagrams, results were destroyed. Everything stayed in this man's head. By the end of the war, all that had been lost, and no one knew what had been accomplished. By digging for the past five years, which was about how long ago I discovered the first hint of this, I believe I've reconstructed this. This is not a rediscovered story, it is a reconstructed one. Officially, it begins on the 28th of March, 1862, the secretary of the Navy, Gideon Wells, receives a letter promising a revolutionary system of submarine warfare. This is not a surprise. Everybody who writes to the second half of this time promises a revolution in underwater warfare, and there are all manner of crackpot ideas, legitimate ideas, and Wells just weeds them out. What undoubtedly got Wells' attention, however, was a PS. The person who sent him the letter appended about a dozen different names of people who he said he had shared hints of the plan with, and they vouched for it. This reads like a who-who of scientists in the Navy, wisest in charge of ordinance, porters and unquantity Wilkes is a scientist. The other five engineers from the Army, they are all graduates one, two, and I think some bum who graduated fifth is in there, they are the best of the best of the Army and the Navy at this point in time. So this has Wells' attention. He might also actually have recognized the author, Lieutenant Edward Bissell Hunt. Hunt is a scientist. He graduated number two in his class from West Point in the 1840s. He's had a long term of service in the Coast Guard, the Coast Survey, I'm sorry. He is a much respected scientist, both within and without the military. He's also the engineer in charge of completing Fort Taylor, which was a bit of a backwater job for years until the war came along, and they realized that Taylor and Jefferson on Drive to Rodriguez were really the choke point for the entire Gulf of Mexico. Along with a number of other officers, he was among the small group that chose to disobey President Buchanan when he said don't interfere with the Southerners as they try to take over federal installations. So that small cadre of officers, Army and Navy are referred to as the saviors of the Gulf. Hunt is a fairly well-known figure at this time in American society. What got Hunt thinking? In his letter at the beginning of March, he makes reference in a very vague letter. He doesn't say what exactly he's invented at all. He says six months ago I started thinking about this. Well I thought what happened six months previous that Hunt would have had access to information about. What happens is the first battle with an ironclad, not between ironclads, with an ironclad. Battle of Southwest passed. On the 12th of October, 1861 the C.S.S. Manassas comes down out of New Orleans in Rams, USS Richmond. Richmond doesn't sink or anything like that, but she's damaged pretty good. And where does she go for repairs? Back to Key West, where Major Hunt undoubtedly has a long discussion with a number of the officers from on board the Richmond. Among that list of officers, the first one there, Dr. Henderson is the surgeon aboard the Richmond at that point in time. The Manassas is a most destructive invention. The shells which hit her just bounced off literally. There was no way to stop her when she wanted to ram. I believe it was slow speed and machinery that really slowed her up at this point in time but kept her from sinking the Richmond. The obvious answer according to all the surface fleets of the world was make us bigger and better guns and we'll puncture that armor. That's how we'll take care of things like this. This of course will lead to an arms race. Improvements in armor will require improvements in weaponry which need new armor which need new weaponry and so on and so on. But around the world in a variety of navies and on the civilian front people are realizing there's an Achilles heel to this. Below that iron belt four or five feet down is a wooden hull that's every bit as vulnerable as was Richmond's hull. If you can reach that Achilles heel this is the way to tackle iron clads. There's a variety of approaches with which I'm sure you're familiar. This bar torpedo from a surface or semi-submerged watercraft is one way to go. The problem is of course you have to get within 14 to 15 or 20 feet which is very very dangerous. There are submarines which again you have to get very close. They might have a spar torpedo, they might deploy diver. These things are technologically a little more intricate, they're difficult to build, time-consuming and they really won't work all that well despite the fact there's about 25 of them in the Civil War. What people want to focus on is the underwater gun because here's a commodity they have in spades that they can repurpose if at all possible both the Royal Navy, the Union Navy and also the private inventors are working very very hard to repurpose surface guns. They can be effective but again only at point blank range. For instance the British Navy takes this monstrous 110 pounder armstrong and proves you can haul a target at 20 feet. You have to get within 20 feet to make this thing work. By that point in time you have to have a heavily armored ship like Manassas because you've been broadsided again and again and again. So yeah can they work? Yes they can but you don't want to try it. The reason for this of course is that when you fire a surface rejectile underwater it's not designed to move through the water. Water is 784 times more dense than the air these shells are meant to go through. For instance this particular gun fires a 45 caliber bullet at 900 feet per second. It should go about 300 yards, it makes it about four feet and you can already see the trajectory starting to generate. Water will just stop a surface rejectile cold. Now on the Ram Manassas what Hunt realizes is that all of its 387 tons of iron, the machinery, the crew, the coal, the entire purpose of the ship is just to deliver the weapon. The 64 pounder gun in the bow is just a fixed weapon to clear the way. The weapon is the ram itself and Hunt starts to think rather than blast this thing out of the water is there a way that we can create that ram without the ship? Can we propel the ram and use that to reach Achilles heel? How powerful exactly was Manassas? What is his target? What's he trying to make? This book is Rocket Science. I am not a rocket scientist. I will warn you that I've made this presentation audience friendly and the book is as palatable as possible. This research made my brain bleed. Going back to humanity story next time I swear but I've used online calculators, consulted other scientists, used a lot of period data so I'm confident in the calculations. This is the only one we're going to use in the presentation. How you calculate how much energy a moving object has. Simply put kinetic energy, the energy it has is one half times the mass times the velocity squared and it's all in meters. What we find with Manassas is that it's effective but it is not efficient. It is wildly wasteful of energy. It's 387 tons moving at a maximum of 10 knots. Packs a punch of over 4 million joules. Joules are just a unit of majoring energy. One joule is the amount of energy it supposedly takes to raise a small apple 39 inches in the air. You know this packs a lot more punch than that but we'll use that again and again just as a reference. So just bear in mind 4.6 million joules is a lot of energy. For comparison how much does it actually take to puncture a 20 inch hole. 20 is about the average maximum of holes at that time below the waterline. You can see that even the lowly 12 pounder cannonball and again this is where surface hits it can puncture that at 650 yards with only 225,000 joules. 18 and 24 pounders pack more of a punch but also a greater range. So it doesn't take that much energy to get through that hole. The problem is not the hole it's the water in between. Like I said this is overkill. The British gun it's muzzle velocity at the surface is still 10 times more than is needed but the fact that it only puncture one side of that target hole tells me that the water just sucked the energy out of that projectile as they fired it. It did not reach that hole with 2.9 million joules of energy. They were probably lucky to get through it all. There is a fourth option and that's rockets. Rockets have been around in warfare since about 1799 when Tipu Sultan in his losing war against the British fired them at the invading English army. The British recognized a good weapon when they saw one and Sir William Congreve comes out with the Congreve Rockets a few years later. Now at this point in time you'll see a lot of fanciful pictures where the rockets are being fired and they're landing you know right on the X. That doesn't happen so much at this point in time. They're not meant to be accurate. It is neither expected nor desired that the rocket hit a specific target. This is because their primary purpose is to break up mass bodies of troops. Remember we're back in the Napoleonic Age. Your command and control extends only as far as that block of infantry can see you and hear you and follow you. If they get busted up you've lost all semblance of control over them. So infantry had gotten very very good at gauging the flight of a cannonball and just moving to one side and letting the cannonball roll through. That was no problem. With a rocket however not only would it graze the ground two or three times and they measure this once it hit it would go every which way. In the air it would go every which way. And that's a good thing because you can't dodge it. You don't know where it's going to go. If I dodge it this way it might go that way. If I move this way it might go that way. So there's no impetus really to improve the trajectory of your aim of rockets in the least. The Royal Navy finds a use for them hitting large targets like towns or forts. They actually make the first rocket ships a phrase they never expected to hear in 1808 and the first rocket troops. We have rocket men at that age and time, point in time. They're good against a giant target where you don't have to hit one specific pinpoint. But as far as actually targeting a specific ship that's really beyond their means. They know it could be effective. At Sevastopol in 1854 Russian rocket troops had lucked in a hit right below the keel of a British ship they had meant to hit on the deck. And the British officer said my god we thought we had run aground on a rock. It shook the whole ship because of course as this rocket explodes into the keel the incompatible water just pushes right up against the ship and all but snaps it. They were shocked at how much damage that could do. In an attempt, one of the more advanced attempts to make rockets work, an American Pascal plant in 1862 actually was very far thinking for some of his other ideas. He makes this rocket launching scoop. He even has the beginning of nascent fins as these iron veins that project off the back of his torpedo. He's actually on the right track. But that last minute redirection of the rocket makes it go screwy. As soon as it comes down and hits that and hits the water at the same time it goes off every which way or goes down in the mud. So the Navy sees no future in Pascal plant's invention. Hunt however has an epiphany. He's not going to use the rocket as a weapon. He doesn't want this thing to explode. This would be a kinetic energy projectile if you will. He just wants to use it as an engine. This is going to be his driving force. I don't know how much of this he explained to the signatories, to his initial letter to Wells. I don't know how much he explained to Wells the very next day. But Wells contacts Secretary of War Stant within 24 hours. And two weeks later Hunt who's been itching, whoops itching to get to the front, is pulled away from this two-week stint at the front lines and is now working for the Navy. This guy is reporting to Wells who's reporting to Lincoln who reports to God. That's the short chain of command. Meanwhile a couple weeks later the Navy at the Brooklyn Navy Art builds a box and that's the reaction of the public in New York and Boston or in Brooklyn. They build it somewhere near the one dry dock that the place has. It's built within a couple weeks. This is based on, this is my modern interpretation of a period drawing I'll show you in a moment or two. And as people are walking back and forth one of the sailors as they're building this box recognizes it's nothing nautical. It takes a piece of chalk and he writes what is it on the side? Now that sounds like a question but back then it could be not only a question but it could be a noun. P.T. Barnum is advertised as having a great variety of what is it? If a comet shows up at one point in time and no one expected it coming it's a celestial what is it? So it's a noun as well and that is the name that is adopted by the Navy officially. This is the what is it? Hunt's rocket will eventually be called the what is it war rocket believe it or not right? All it is going to be is a test bed even though the locals the rumor goes crazy. It's it's going to be a submerged battery we're going to put it in the bottom of the James River it's going to fire straight up maybe it uses a compressed air cannon we're going to armor plate this thing you know we have no idea what kind of engine it's going to use it's like this barely floats it's not going to go anywhere but the public just goes crazy theorizing what this thing is going to be and the Navy just sits back and says fine go figure. This is what it actually looks like inside this drawing from 1874 JAD is a Johnny Adolphus Dogring gun this cannon was put in merely to test models of the rocket this is not what it looks like in the end we'll get to that in a few minutes it basically has a hatch for a man to climb down a gun hatch to strike the gun uh there's a band of rubber around the muzzle to keep the water from coming in and it's got kentledge or scrap iron if you will just to ballast it down so this stays below the water line which is right here the thing is mounted on two logs because there is no recoil so the gun doesn't have to worry about rolling back or anything it is loaded by closing this gun port pumping out the water from a pump on the main deck and a man hops down the front hatch and loads the rocket in for the next test fire there's a lot of delays getting even to that stage and it's not until january and february of 1863 that the what is it is towed away from the brookly navy yard for tests the navy wants to keep this sort of quiet they don't want people following along especially curious foreigners and actually we can talk about that later why the foreigner thing was so important they report that they're going to go test this somewhere out in the channel here the reports that they let leak back are not promising the thing is supposed to be a failure it's not the experiments don't work the web doesn't work and one report even says it's down in graves in bay which is ridiculous one way to haul the thing breaking up in a storm and yet on the 14th of february when they do return the papers are reporting an astonishing success the thing works exactly the way hunt had expected it to work now what exactly had he done these trials are meant to test various models of the rocket one model he tested just a straightforward rocket another version has lateral vents to make it spin all right this is an attempt to spin it like a bullet does no one's sure if that's going to work or not another version actually jackets it in an oak sleeve with spiral helical channels cut down it this is actually brilliant on hunts part because instead of using rocket vents to spin it an internal force to push out against the water he's using the oncoming water to force it to spin so there's no reactive to no reaction to it this may have been hunts original design because in an october 1862 letter at the end of a long period when we don't hear anything about him he writes to the assistant secretary of the navy asking for some help resolving some unidentified problem i think the navy yard is bulking at how much resources this guy's eating up because they're trying to get ships out left and right and he says we've spent so much time in trouble trying to economize on the rifling because this is what they go back to i assume that the lateral vents and anything else they managed to do that didn't survive the history books were things the navy said let's simplify this this is time consuming to cut this oak all the time and she the rocket in it this i believe was his original idea and what he convinced the navy we have to go back to during one of those trials one of these torpedoes i assume one of the all metal ones traveled 250 feet underwater so he's already out range any underwater gun on the face of the planet the weapon looks to be very very promising unfortunately then it porpoise stuff in the air went under 150 feet at which point in time it dove back under the water and went who knows where and who knows how far a lot of people said okay this this is a failure obviously at this point having called it a failure i'd like to remind you of the old story of the blind man and the elephant where six blind men each touch a different part of the elephant and come away with a totally different idea of what it is they just felt the man at the tail says oh it's like a vine the man at the tusks says oh it's like a spear the man at the legs is oh it's stout pillars like a house each one extrapolates a little bit of information he has into the full story this is what will happen historically with hunt's secret weapon because later writers navy and civilian will zone in on one or two little bits of information especially the failure of these january february trials and say oh the weapon was a failure if you look hunt up in histories of torpedoes you will universally find one or two paragraphs at end with the weapon didn't work and it was a failure in reality hunt is promoted he's been made a captain just for making 14 years service by 1861 two weeks after this was a failure he's promoted to a major this is discretionary it's a reward why in the world would he be promoted if he's just failed also come on technology why would they allow the project to continue the navy and the army does not suffer fools gladly in the civil war they'll look at a crackpot invention but if it doesn't work and you can't make a thousand of them in a week get out of here he's allowed to continue and by hunt's own estimation one of the few letters i have in his own hand he says these original tests the first tests were only conducted to test the correctness of general principles he expected some failures he's a scientist he's going through everything the navy wants him to try saying yes this does not work yes that does not work this one does by june of 1863 the what is it has been changed the device you see inside was actually seen on the dock as early as december but it wasn't ready in time for those initial tests it also wasn't needed for those initial tests the the dog and gun worked fine they've struck or knocked off the watertight chamber up front and also the loading hatch the kentlage has been moved back some and what's now on a track is quite possibly and this is my reconstruction the navy's first torpedo tube in 1863 it is based on this drawing and a description basically it's simplicity itself the torpedo is loaded down through a top hatch and we can talk about how that's physically done if anybody just after the talk and once it's loaded the rear hatch is closed then the front hatch is open to allow it to flood this alone is a brilliant thing on hunt spark is all those underwater guns they're trying to fire them dry and hitting the wall of water which is losing a lot of the momentum right off the bat and then expecting to travel through hunt is pre-flooding the chamber once that's done the front hatch is left open and what's called a gomes fuse which is instantaneous it's fulminator mercury on a string basically it will the spark will travel one mile in four seconds it's like pushing a button it fires the rocket and off it goes and then the front hatch is closed the water's pumped out and you can load again the final torpedo has also changed they've gone from this is a cutaway showing the the powder inside the rocket composition it's called hunt is going beyond that and convince the navy that this works this is a striated jacket if you will having proved his point the final torpedo is 77 inches long a few inches over my head it's 12 inches in diameter weighs about 300 pounds on the 19th of june is the c-minor's final trial as far as the navy's concerned and in the papers they reported that officers of the army and the navy went with him and the evolutions performed demonstrated the entire success of the battery there's nothing negative anyone has to say about this weapon at this time and to prove that the navy only a few weeks later the ordinance bureau says start building these things they put out orders that they want the what is it shell or marine war rocket designed by evi hunt to go into production and what's curious about this notice it said army's army officers as well as navy officers why in the world is the army curious about this at all this is a navy weapon if you're in simple also a part of that report which was entirely successful quote unquote says that shots were fired from underwater to an astonishing height why in the world would you want an aerial torpedo and why doesn't that count as a mistake again blind men in the elephant some people read this and say look he still has guidance problems the thing is screwing up and going in the air in reality although the navy's happy with their weapon to fire under water and get to that vulnerable hull it's the army not the navy that's responsible for short emplacements as we'll see in a few minutes this thing goes at an incredible speed if you miss the ship or go through the ship and you're trying to defend a narrow bay or a river guess where the torpedo goes into an opposing gun in placement on the other side or into the town you're trying to defend the army can't use a laterally fired torpedo that goes as fast as we'll see this thing does what the army needs is high trajectory fire this is why i believe shots were fired from underwater to an astonishing height he's got high angle fire he's got a dual purpose torpedo the challenges of adjusting what was meant to be a lateral launch torpedo for high angle fire are nothing that really don't hunt he basically is going to spend a few weeks he figures and he's doing things like probably reducing the fuel changing the angle more importantly he's creating what's called a range table one of the reasons i could talk about surface guns in such detail here their impact velocity their speed their ranges was artillery's in the army and navy spent years making up range tables basically if i put this much power in put the gun at this angle and i fired this size projectile it will go x number of feet and they have beautiful tables that are broken down by hundreds of yards for every type of gun there's no such thing for a rocket torpedo because no one's ever invented one successfully no one ever gets them to work twice in the same way hunt of course has his working i think what he's doing from july to september is creating a range table unfortunately the 30th of september tragedy strikes and major hunt is is killed um possibly because he's he's terribly overworked the army has had him not at their back and call for many many months working for the navy and they want their officer back just to give you a sense of what's happening here this weapon is not really intended to defeat the confederate navy our surface navy can deal with them we are terribly concerned that we will be fighting france and england in the coming months americans if you read the papers at that time they don't only expect it they are certain of it in the newspapers are not saying if they're saying when we have to face british fleets when the french arrive they are very nervous they track the movement of every british and french ship anytime two get together they they really pay attention if a squadron shows up they're very very nervous the russians who would have been our allies in such a world war have actually parked a squadron of powerful new ironclads in the brooklyn navy yard ready to go hammers and tongs against the french and british in case they get past the navy because this would mostly be a seawall stopping the french and british from coming over in case they get past them the army wants their series of fortifications along the coast finished hunt has experienced this he worked on fort taylor for years he is being tasked along with finishing seaminer with building defenses on dutch island here in harbour he has to go to new haven and new london either refurbish or build from scratch brand new forts the guy has four different demanding responsibilities and he's basically shuttling around like crazy and what's more all his peers his scientists and the other engineers have the same kind of workload they are being utterly exhausted because america expects to fight the british again come springtime that's the background to all this hunt i don't know if he's preoccupied obviously never writes about this he goes to fire and when he pulls the lanyard where fires off the gomes fuse he realizes there's no trail of bubbles there's nothing i forgot to open the front hatch he rushes down inside of course it's too late the thing fires instantaneously all the gases that should have propelled this thing at what you'll see is an incredible speed miles across the bay they build up inside the launcher it is not meant to withstand this kind of pressure it probably breaks you know it's weakest point which is the rear hatch here and it fills the entire chamber with poison gas co2 or as they call them aphidic gases hunt is able to stagger back to the ladder and climb up the 10 feet far enough to wave for help and then falls back down three men in succession go down to help him and each one of them passes out also uh as as the fumes start to dissipate they manage to get a rope around hunt and try pulling him up the rope slips he falls again during one of these falls before they get him out on the next try he hits his head on some stanchions some fitting on the deck a piece of cantaloupe whatever the guy has what's called compression of the brain and concussion at the same time this is a nasty wound even nowadays he is taken back to the marine hospital of the bookland navy yard where he lingers for two days they try every trick in the book the navy surgeons uh i believe it's it's it's surgeon smith and they can't even bring him around and he dies on the second of october the project is dropped i'm not really sure why uh because the navy who had a working torpedo that they're putting in production and i had assumed knew enough about how it worked to make the thing work you only have to aim it and fire it there wasn't that much intricate if the humanities guy can figure it out i should think the navy at the time could figure it out but the plea that his wife helen made and also the brand new army navy journal that this be completed did resonate with the the powers that be in washington i believe there was secret funding that the senate passed that spring of 64 there's a secret senate bill we're not secret bill a senate bill that passes allowing discretionary funding to the secretary of the navy he can spend on what he wants in effect it's it's a dark slush fund and it says specifically for submarine weaponry it may have been for hunt the problem is like i said before everyone is so burdened with getting forts prepared all the forts around new york need refurbished all of his buddies who say oh i'm familiar with the project but i can't devote time to it find me someone to actually do the hands-on work i can do the science nobody can be found the launcher of course is destroyed and in a macabre move it's actually given to his wife helen hi here's the device secured your husband put in your parlor she gives it back of course saying i don't want the damn thing and the navy eventually melts it down surrenders it to the crucible is the phrase so nobody is able to figure out the weapon at this point in time what's more as i mentioned earlier hunt destroyed all the plans at every single stage of this game there is nothing that remains we know this because a man who supposedly worked hand in glove with him a guy named john van doran is a civilian van doran writes a letter in 1874 that talks about how closely worked with hunt i'm just leery of his statement for one he's trying to push his own torpedo which is based very closely on hunts torpedo and uh he's a civilian i doubt hunt would have shared much of anything with him he is there the day he dies he met him when he first started the project he was there on and off again my impression is he's more of a facilitator a gover he's an architect a naval architect at the shipyard but i doubt hunt kept him in the loop and even if he did he wasn't privy to all the diagrams and schematics and you know results that hunt kept to himself again this is the blind men and the elephant story people read about this and say oh the weapon didn't work they didn't pursue it it's it's a non-functioning weapon and that's what you're reading the history books in reality however let's take a look at what hunt actually created a backup i was about ready to publish this book back in may and just to try and get some analogous performance data because there is none on this of course i approached john kennedy and i said john i'm looking for a torpedo designed by lieutenant barber here at goat island in 1869 1870 or so you have records i could i could look at and he sent me over to the archives well i never did find anything on barbers torpedo because i don't think it was actually physically built but hand of history was guiding me i opened the first book in one of the old dusty boxes they had shipped in and here's a diagram of hunts torpedo this was drawn not by hunt this was drawn at the washington aviar where at least one was either shipped or that's where they were building them they're all burned out and destroyed by december of 1864 now hunt would have pitched a fit from the grave had he known some navy officer drew this thing because he's taking great pains to destroy every single possible scrap of evidence so no foreign spy can find this thing and use it but this guy draws it and bless his soul he puts measurements in and he color codes it the key doesn't survive but the color coding is enough just knowing what different metals were available let's take a look at what hunt came up with this is the final c-minor torpedo as we've seen and based on that previous drawing well we'll modernize it here so it looks a little more lethal this is a cutaway of it and we can actually identify a lot of the parts inside what packs the punch is a 54 pound iron weight housed in a tin cup up here if you will inside the oak jacket you've got your motor here engine which is the standard four inch torpedo packed with rocket composition you've got a sliding lead weight which is critical in a few minutes a couple different types of wood here lignan vtai lead weight led back here for the exhaust port i was able to theorize this based on that drawing come on because of the color coding i know what materials are commonly available i use period data for the weights knowing this was oak and that the other wood the lignan vtai is shaded differently and knowing very very closely by noticing closely that the blues and the grays make a difference i was able to theorize what's led what's iron what's tin what's bronze this is my theory but i believe it's sound because it comes out to exactly the 209 and a half pounds we need for this torpedo now how fast did it go this is the punch line um i'm too cagey to say i actually believe this 100 but let's just look at the period data here indicated horsepower is a major of performance it's a way to gauge how well a reciprocating engine of the period works we're going to use it just as a gauge in 1884 a royal navy lieutenant uh slim and charles slim and i believe wrote treaties on locomotive torpedoes and in it he noted that okay for every indicated horsepower in a whitehead torpedo you get twice that many knots that seemed to hold true no matter what size the torpedo was in a rocket torpedo of 12 inches diameter the indicated horsepower is 760 which tops out at 1748 miles per hour not only do i not that's beyond belief but they don't need near that much energy but the potential is there according to their period data what's more instead of the whitehead is 200 yard range this would have 8,760 yards range and what's more the fuel will burn out in 10 seconds this thing is a laser going through the water uh slim and makes the understatement of the century saying the probable speed of a rocket torpedo will be very great we should have seen his data for the 15 and 24 inch rockets my god how hard did this thing hit going that fast if that torpedo is actually moving at its maximum indicator horsepower speed it's packing 41 million joules of energy this is way over the top it would not only hit an enemy ship and sink it it will go through it it's nine times what menace is packed and 184 times more than what is needed by that 12 pounder ball all you really need is 128 miles an hour so hunt has more than enough energy and an incredible range at this point in time what about balance this is the achilles heel and this was this was actually critical to this research that torpedo displaces 4.57 cubic feet that much water weighs 298.85 pounds this guy has figured out near perfect displacement that means the torpedo can sit in the water not sink not rise and go like this and it will just go until the energy runs out the guy has perfect balance this is a incredible um for a torpedo as for a surface projectile if you can make what's called the center of figure the middle of the thing coincident or in the same spot as the center of balance the center of gravity it will just perform exceptionally well the problem with rockets was that as it exhausts fuel the fanny gets lighter and the nose gets heavier which causes it to tip down and well okay that's the trajectory I might want what happens is the wind is now hitting it and sends it off course so instead of just doing this it might tend to get pushed off course like this this has been the achilles heel of rockets hunt figures are way to solve this problem knowing the weights of all the different elements inside the rocket I was able to go through and slice it into one inch segments at every one inch segment I knew how much tin or bronze or leather iron or wood was in that one inch segment so again you can see this in the book every single inch has a certain weight all right that's helpful I know the center of figure is you know half way down it's gonna be 38.5 inches where's the center of gravity after expending almost a week trying to find a scientific page that would tell me how to do this was 77 different increments I lucked across lumber a scientist actually admitted uh yeah this is better done with experimentation than trying to calculate it so what I did was I built a torpedo my wife said you're absolutely insane and I agreed this took about three weeks totally disrupted my workshop there are no scientific weights there but each one of the weights was measured on aircraft an airplane luggage scale to within 0.02 ounces of the exact tonnage or weight that I knew each one inch was so this is accurate they might be wine bottles filled with water it might be an anvil but the weight is spot on even the weight of the board is calculated in there what I did was backtrack with the fuel level at 100 full the center of gravity is off by one-half inch as we exhaust the fuel it moves spot on to 38.5 3875 385 and back to 39 the way hunt has the fuel configured as it burns and consumes the weight the center of balance does not change the guy has perfect displacement he has perfect balance from launch to fuel burnout there is no reduction in speed unlike a surface rejectile because this thing is carrying its energy with it there's no such thing as muzzle velocity the range is greater than any period naval gun over five miles and there's more than enough energy to puncture any hull on the planet at that point in time far more than is needed evidence of high trajectory this one this one may be nervous for a little while here because when I first made the torpedo and the balancing board I knew that this was a sliding balance because of that diagram if you look very very closely and I was a graphic designer for years every little mark makes a difference the colors make a difference and what I noticed was these aren't wood screws those are set screws they're meant not to pierce the metal housing but just to push up against it to keep that sliding balance in place if you loosen them you can move the sliding balance as I was I put my balance in the middle of the torpedo on that board you saw and the nose just went funk and I thought okay what's meant to slide we'll slide it back I slid it back six inches nose didn't move foot two feet I moved it almost all the way to the end and the nose wouldn't come up and I thought well I've just you know really blown three weeks doing nothing I moved it all the way to the back and that's the only spot that the torpedo balances which means that does not have to slide as far as the Navy is concerned leave the balance there it can be fixed that's what makes this torpedo worked as far as a horizontal shot goes by moving it forward though I'm making it more nose heavy which must be I believe one of the things Hunt was trying to calculate into his range table if I have a target that's closer than I expected to be I will move the lead weight forward making it more nose heavy as I launch it it's going to tip over faster than if the weight's in the fanny and it's going to go further that's what I think he's doing is trying to make the range table calculations based on trajectory on how much fuel it has where that sliding balance is at again simple calculations but he needs a lot of them there's a bunch of different variables in there as far as evidence of success goes again all the history books will just dismiss major hunts efforts and say this was a failure these are logics to me this receives funding for 18 months while other simultaneous programs are dumped and while I could not find evidence for it I'm half wondering if some of these other promising projects were squashed so that funding could go to hunt I have no figure for how much they spent on hunts project the other ones that were squashed were in the 15,000 to 30,000 dollar range which is about one-fifteenth of what the money would be worth today so the the federal navy is dropping a lot of money on weapons research but they're killing projects while hunts is continuing for 18 months his weapon passes the trials and he's immediately made a major two weeks afterwards you don't reward somebody who fails these reporters entirely successful and the navy puts it into production the navy at the time considered this a success in 1874 after the failure of the fish torpedo program here in Newport the navy went looking for evidence of sea minor they remembered they had done something in the middle of the civil war but again even at the navy one reason why the navy couldn't do the reporters couldn't pump the sailors and the officers at the navy yard for information was nobody knew anything quite possibly commander almi and maybe animal pauling who's in charge of it maybe they knew something was up they knew none of the details only hunt knew all the details everyone else was kept so totally in the dark that afterwards there was no information to be found even that diagram that I showed you stayed in washington dc until about 1880 when it got stuck in a box and sent up here john and I didn't expect to find it over here we had no idea it existed so there was no information that they can go on to rebuild the program the secrecy ensured that no evidence remained hunt was such a maniac for secrecy that there was nothing there for a foreign power to discover and nothing for a historian to just open a box and say here's the whole book in my opinion I believe this was an incredibly successful weapon one of the reasons why it probably was not pursued was that the intended target if you will french and british warships were not quite as much of a threat by 1864 the confederate navy was slowly being rolled up we were winning the war and the french and british were starting to play a little nicer with us around the planet they were not going to war with us as it looked like in 62 and 63 I think we just let it lapse because no one could pick up where hunt had left off no one understood it or was available and when the war ends there's nobody on the planet who understands what hunt had managed and even trying to find that evidence years later there is none so again it's chalked up the blind man in the elephant any questions he hesitates to ask that's why I stay behind the podium this time all right thank you thank you yes sir what was the approximate date that they finally developed a workable torpedo finally 100 after world war two you've got you've got guidance problems right up through world war two oh I should mention too again I cut out so much from the book to do this presentation what hunt achieved launching a torpedo underwater and having it become aerial to strike a target the high-angle fire would not be replicated until 1945 with a towed missile array that was meant to launch a v2 from behind a u-boat we would not manage that until the Polaris program until the 1950s hunt was that far ahead of his time and to my knowledge while we've experimented with rocket torpedo since then we have yet to find something that works like this next summer I'm building a scale model finding a quiet beach and just lighting that thing off seriously I didn't probably get in trouble for it but I have to know how this thing works I think it's like I said a laser several years ago I think the Navy got interested in hyperphilosophy undersea weapons that's torpedo defense have you looked into that have a look into that no it's not you won't find most of it but there's some that's in there there's probably a good reason when I first gave this talk and in Lynn to about a dozen people we finished the talk and once everyone had caught their breath first guy says uh does the Navy know you're researching this so that's why I potentially haven't looked into that yes sir the Navy never gave up the rockets and then World War two and Korean War they operated the LSMIs and they carried ahead the firepower of a cruiser for 18 minutes but they went after it and the temperature changed it landed different locations so they never mastered it that was another problem with rocket composition depending how you you compounded it whether it was humid that day or dry that day uh the the the sailors didn't like carrying the stuff on board their ships or it might be moist especially in a wooden ship because as the stuff got more moist the performance degraded so you might pull the lanyard and here instead of your whoosh there was no way to predict it so rocket composition went out of out of favor but by god when it worked it works splendidly your wife was to know if you have life insurance my wife who's my editor and uh and first reader she got very very good at glazing her eyes over and just going oh yeah perfect displacement that's nice honey you know if you if you could venture would you say ahead he lived were they ready to use these things I think very much so I don't think they would have bothered against the Confederacy simply because by that point in time we're up the rivers and everything uh this is made for open ocean combat to stop British and French fleets I think they would have put it in production and just quietly kept it in the arsenal waiting for the British to come over and it would have instantly tipped the balance of power like that because it was nothing the British could could do with the French at that point in time Whitehead torpedoes are first used in combat and someone correct me if I'm wrong I think it's in the 1870s or 80s by a couple South American navies at war and one did explode and sink a ship but otherwise they he had he had the same guidance problems that afflicted everybody uh his torpedoes were incredibly expensive and large and intricate he kept the patent so you could buy a torpedo but you weren't allowed to duplicate or anything like that so again it's been a real challenge to get torpedoes to work all the way for the next 80 years after this other questions because all of the torpedoes what had worked and eventually ended up with gyros right um at least they went straight down straight down I'm just wondering though if those helical grooves did the trick because there's nothing to push it off course unless it gets hit by okay in 10 seconds going 8 000 yards I think it's going so fast the current one affected unless it's you know a tidal wave I think you'll find it probably does not go really that fast no I agree I agree but I don't I could not find any reports and I will admit I I can't tell you and I mentioned this in the book that you have heard the entire story of major hunts rocket torpedo there's just not enough evidence they didn't have anyone ever claimed this is the complete story this is what I theorize based on what period evidence I had which really comes down to four or five letters on newspaper reports that diagram the testimony of the civilian who may or may not be feathering his own nest in 1874 and a couple confused navy officers who again saw one little piece of it I believe this is accurate as far as can be reconstructed yes sir have you contacted anybody like a David Taylor model based on some of this calculation it was easy to build the thing they calculated yes seriously we could we could model it yes to see how it perform in the water that that would be a next step I really just wanted to finish this book so I could my brain heal I had mentioned also that these diagrams are in the book as far as practicalities go I realized that this loading procedure it can't work unless you pivot the gun up and down if you will for instance I was curious at first why in the world you would need a ball and socket joint that allows the gun to be rotated in 360 degrees when all you want to do is train it left and right you don't want it to go up or down you want to launch horizontally with a ball and socket joint I believe is one for the high angle fire but also to facilitate loading if you winch this thing up the torpedo just clears the manhatch and you can load it just like you're loading torpedoes into your modern submarine also the high angle fire is one thing that I admit to not understanding how we pulled that off in June because he demonstrates horizontal fire in June which means that the what is it has to be you know sitting level like that with the waterline halfway up if you do that and you haven't moved the launcher you can only get about five degrees elevation and there's no indication that they actually physically relocated the ball and socket joint up high it wouldn't work for the horizontal launch anyway I'm wondering again just this is why it's in the appendix not the main story if they took this dangerous expedient of moving all the ballast to the stern of what is it just to tip it up and fire it once I have no idea again absolute mystery I just couldn't figure out how else he might have done that I know he did it because of the reports how he did it I have no idea this is not what you expect for the civil war is it there is a story I didn't I didn't take the time to track down because again it's mission creep I was focusing on this someone who reported reading this and I will want to find the source though that someone in Richmond in the middle of the war had basically brought a rocket to demonstrate for Jeff Davis and he claimed he could strike Washington 60 miles away remember the technology isn't changed it's just a matter of scale unfortunately for the inventor and the history books this thing just took off for the heavens like a bat out of hell and no one knows where it went somewhere in someone's field in the woods there's a massive iron they've no idea what the hell that thing is it was this guy's rocket so these these guys are not technologically stupid they're just sort of limited by ways and means they're learning how to do things I think hunt succeeded if nothing else he certainly deserves more than a failed you know weapon mentioned in a lot of history books and this if this is actually true and I believe it is this this is a new page in navy history or at least a page we didn't know was there any other questions folks yes sir did you fire your sample talk not yet I when I realized how fast it would probably go I skipped the idea of trying it in the high school gymnasium pool and my sister-in-law said no right off the bat so that's going to be an ocean side thing next summer at some point in time we're the GPS I know what the devil it goes the explosion that got hunt you said the front cap was not removed the hatch in the front of the yeah who was to do that was it hunt somebody else in knowing hunt it was probably him he just made a bonehead mistake the guy is exhausted he's probably done these tests day in day out every time he's at the navy he's thinking of a thousand different things and he just you know it's so obvious he forgot it unfortunately his loss is not so much for this weapon we would eventually develop torpedoes but just to america if you look in the book or whatever his his list of publications is absolutely incredible he speaks annually before the war at the american association for the advancement of science his fellow scientist said that the only other thing he failed to write down besides this was his theory of molecular physics which they said as far as they understood it basically explained the universe and everything in it this is yeah that's a big one but hunt said i'm not quite happy with a few details so i'm not going to publish yet and he took that secret to his grave too so yes sir the spiral grooves was that ever tested on the water by the name only here as far as I know also we had veins on the outside though right yeah yeah these are cut into which i think make a difference there's a famous architect named ray hot who died recently is he related to mr hunt or captain hunt i have i have no idea hunt unfortunately had he had two sons one of whom died in the 1850s rather sadly for his wife hideously and then his older son or younger son renny died just a year after his demise and they're both buried with him at west point his wife despite suffering those shattering blows uh basically secluded herself with friends here in newport for about six months following his death and then emerged like a butterfly from a cocoon and went on to become hell and hunt jackson and enjoy a long and distinguished career as an advocate of indian rights and a novel writer in the west actually some of the information i got in the photographs this came from all over the place is the little hints here and there a lot came from the helen hunt library at the college out in colorado where she where she spent her last days now the other stuff came from a biography on index of emily dickinson dickinson said that a book like this on index is a real challenge i'll tell you but she said that of all the men have ever met edward hunts you'll never respected you know you just get little hints here and there i mean when i went looking for for papers in that gus fox had saved one letter that talked about hunts trials with the rifling and everything that's all that exists nobody else kept anything better try the model yeah thank you very much thank you thank you