Robert Whitehead

Robert Whitehead (1823 to 1905) was an English engineer who developed the first successful self-propelled torpedo. He was born in Bolton on 3 January 1823, attended Bolton Grammar School and at sixteen was apprenticed to the Manchester engineers and ironfounders Richard Ormerod, training as an engineer and draughtsman. In 1846 he moved to Marseilles to work as a marine design engineer, then set up as a consulting engineer in Milan specialising in textile machinery, and finally settled in Trieste on the Adriatic, where he concentrated on marine steam engines. In 1864 he made a contract with the retired Austrian naval captain Giovanni Biagio Luppis to develop Luppis's 1860 invention of a coast defence boat, which led to the Whitehead-Luppis torpedo. He died on 14 November 1905.