Infernal devices
Torpedoes and Rockets
Robert Whitehead, a British engineer, was working in Fiume for an Austrian manufacturer when he developed the first modern torpedo. Quickly adopted by the Austrian Navy in 1868, Whitehead was invited back to Britain in 1869 to bring the invention home. Following highly successful tests, manufacturing rights were bought by the Royal Navy, and the Royal Laboratories at Woolwich began manufacture in 1872.
The torpedoes were made at Woolwich until 1910 (by the Royal Gun Factory after 1890), when manufacture moved to Greenock. The first above-water launching was made when the Navy slid a 14" torpedo off a mess-table and through a porthole. The later cradle used by HMS Thunderer on the left does not seem a great improvement. Powered by compressed air driving contra-rotating propellers, the early Woolwich torpedoes had a range of up to 800 yards.
The first ship to be sunk by a torpedo was the Blanco Encalada in 1891 during the Chilean revolutionary war. Hit by a single torpedo, she sank immediately. The captain, Don Luis Goni, was ejected up a ventilation shaft and into the sea by the explosion, and was last seen swimming ashore with his arm around the ship's mascot, a Llama. The creature was taken onboard HMS Warspite as a mascot, until, having eaten the epaulettes off an Admiral's dress uniform, it was banished to London Zoo in disgrace.
Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, gave Colonel Wellesley an unpleasant surprise during the siege of Seringapatam in 1799; they fired rockets at him. The Indian rockets (one of which survives in Firepower's collection) were sophisticated, and in advance of anything Britain had at that time. It is believed that Colonel Congreve worked from a captured example at the Arsenal in developing the Congreve Rocket. It was, essentially, a black powder charge in a round soft-iron case on the end of a long stick.
The rocket, for land or sea service use, was often as dangerous to fire as to manufacture. The gunpowder had to be tightly compressed in the tube for the weapon to be effective; the Arsenal's rocket factory was therefore sited in isolation on the eastern side of the canal. Congreve's first large rockets at Woolwich, from 1805, achieved a range of 2,000 yards, and soon the Arsenal was manufacturing 32lbr rockets with a 3,000 yard range. Had they been accurate, they would have been deadly.
The Navy first used rockets to bombard Boulogne in 1806; Napoleon offered a reward to any French inventor who could rival it (none succeeded). The Army used them for the first time a year later to destroy Copenhagen. They were also used at Danzig and at Waterloo. Major Whinyates RA had been allowed to use his beloved rockets at Quatre Bras to cover the retirement; the first one to be fired demolished a French gun and its crew, the rest rose vertically into the air or veered to the side.
Captain Mercer was chased up the Brussels Road by one that had turned through 180 degrees. One cannot suppose he thought highly of Congreve's rocket. Surgeon James (who, as Elizabeth Longford commented, escaped being chased) had a different view; he found their sound alone "more harsh and horrid than the thunder of the guns".

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Congreve rocket comes to us from the Siege of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812; the Navy made use of them to bombard the American defenders. Frances Scott Key commemorated the event in a poem that was later to become the American national anthem:-

Oh say, can you see, By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the
perilous fight,
Over the ramparts we watched were so gallantly
streaming?

And the Rockets Red Glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night,
That our Flag was still there.
Oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave,
Over the land of the free, and the home of the brave?