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Revision as of 05:54, 7 May 2006
Ivan Blaž Lupis Vukić (Giovanni Biagio Luppis) (1813/1814 – 1875) was a Croatian naval engineer who had invented the first self-propelled torpedo.
Lupis was born in Nakovana on Pelješac. He attended a gymnasium in Rijeka and naval academy in Venice.
He served in the Austro-Hungarian Navy and rose in ranks up to the captain of frigate. In 1848/49 he was an officer on the ships that blockaded Venice, and later commandeered a frigate against Sardinians and France.
Lupis thought about how to defend the Dalmatian coast from intrusions of the Italian Garibaldines, and decided to work on technical innovations to counter that threat. He envisioned a device for destroying ships that would be unmanned and controlled from the land, while the explosive charges would detonate at the moment of impact. His first prototype was one meter long, had glass wings, and was controlled via long ropes from the coast. It didn't succeed due to a primitive implementation.
The second model was built with a clock mechanism as the engine for the propeller. The explosives were in the stern and were ignited through a pistol-like control, which in turn was activated through the bow, the sides or the mast. It had two rudders: one turned to the right, the other to the left, that were moved by ropes/wires from the land. After numerous experiments, this design, marked "6 m", finally performed well enough. He nicknamed it "saviour of the coast".
In 1860, when Lupis was already retired from the Navy, he managed to demonstrate the "6 m" design to the emperor Franz Joseph, and it was a success, but the naval commission refused to accept it without better propulsion and control systems.
The Rijeka mayor Ivan Ciotta then introduced Lupis to the British machine engineer Robert Whitehead, with whom he signed a contract in 1864 to develop the torpedo further. While Whitehead significantly altered the original design, he always credited Lupis with the invention. They made the device run under water and installed an engine running on compressed air, as well as automatic guidance for the depth and direction.
On December 21, 1866, Whitehead's and Lupis' torpedo, now named Minenschiff, was officially demonstrated in front of the Austro-Hungarian state commission for evaluation. This model was 355 mm in diameter and 3.35 m in length, weighing 136 kg (8 kg of explosives). The naval commission accepted it, and subsequently on March 6, 1867, the government contracted the inventors for a test production and agreed to pay all the production costs. On May 27, 1867, the navy paid 200,000 forints of royalties to the inventors. Whitehead then moved to Rijeka where he opened the first torpedo factory in 1873 by converting an old metal smelting plant.
Lupis died in Torrigga, Lago di Como.
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