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Giovanni Biagio Luppis von Rammer (August 27, 1813 – January 11, 1875) was an Italian officer of the Austrian Navy, born in Rijeka Croatia, who had the idea of the first self-propelled torpedo.

Early years

Giovanni Luppis or Lupis was born in Rijeka in 1813, from a local aristocratic family with Ragusan and Apulian roots. In that time the city belonged to the Austrian Empire (after 1867 to Kingdom of Hungary) and had an large number of ethnic italianians in it . Lupis attended a gymnasium in Fiume/Rijeka and the Austrian Navy's academy: the "Collegio di marina" of Venice. Then he married a noble woman of Rijeka, Elisa de Zotty.

He served in the Austrian Navy and rose in ranks up to the Frigate Captain (Fregattenkapitan). In 1848/49 he was an officer on the ships that blockaded Venice.

The 'Salvacoste'

About the middle of the nineteenth century, an officer of the Austrian Marine Artillery conceived the idea of employing a small boat carrying a large charge of explosives, powered by a steam or an air engine and remotely steered by cables to be used against enemy ships. Upon his death, before he had perfected his invention or made it public, the papers of this anonymous officer came into the possession of Capt. Giovanni Luppis.

He envisioned a floating 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 "salvacoste" ("coastsaver").

In 1860, when Luppis 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 meeting with Robert Whitehead

In 1864 the Fiume/Rijeka mayor Giovanni de Ciotta, introduced Luppis to the British machine engineer Robert Whitehead, manager of the local factory "Stabilimento Tecnico Fiumano", with whom signed a contract to develop the 'salvacoste' further.

Whitehead built a model but decided that the idea was not viable. He did however start to think about the problem of setting off explosive charges remotely below a ship's waterline-this being far more effective than above water bombardment. So, Whitehead made a device running under water and installed an engine running on compressed air, as well as automatic guidances for the depth and direction. So, Whitehead significantly altered the original design; anyway he always credited Lupis with the invention.

On December 21, 1866 the first automobile 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.

Whitehead retained the copyrights and even negotiated a new contract with Luppis which gave Whitehead full control of all future sales. On May 27, 1867, the navy paid 200,000 forints of royalties to the inventor. The invention was generally regarded as a promising one, but in the first years of production there were not enough orders, so “Stabilimento” went through a crisis and bankrupted in 1873. R. Whitehead took it over and at the beginning of 1875 transformed it into a private company called “Torpedo-Fabrik von Robert Whitehead”.

Giovanni Luppis was given the noble title von Rammer ("the sinker") on August 1, 1869. He died in Milan on January 11, 1875.

The family of Giovanni Luppis

Luppis was descended from a branch of the Italian noble family of Lupis, that has moved to Dalmatia from Giovinazzo, Puglia. This branch moved first to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and then to the Ragusan peninsula of Pelješac/SabbioncelloCroatia, where Slavicized the name in Vuk or Vukašinovic (another adaptation of lupus, "wolf"). When, in XVII century, one of his ancestors had moved to Rijeka, that in that time had a mostly Italian urban population, he Italianized again his name in Luppis.

Other names

In Croatia Luppis is known as' Ivan Blaž Lupis Vukić . This name is not historically documented.

Further reading

• Gray, Edwin. The Devil's Device: Robert Whitehead and the History of the Torpedo, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991 310pp, ISBN 0-87021-245-1

• Wilson, H. W. Ironclads in action;: A sketch of naval warfare from 1855 to 1895, London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1895, Fourth Edition 1896 (Two Volumes), pre ISBN

External links and references

• The Lupis family (Site about the noble family of Giovanni Luppis)
• History of the Lupis Family (in Italian).
• History of the torpedo factory in Fiume/Rijeka (Acts of the 1st International Conference on the occasion of 150th anniversary of torpedo factory in Rijeka)
• History of the Whithead Factory (part one)
• Evolution of the submarine weapons in XIX century (in Italian)
• History of R. Whitehead (site about Royal Navy)
• History of the torpedo: the early days (Journal of the Royal Navy Scientific Service Vol 27 No 1)
• Torpedo History (Naval Undersea Museum of U.S. Navy)

• 1813 births
• 1875 deaths
• Croatian inventors
• Italian inventors
• Weapon designers