Weapon with a deadly sting
Coffee break 2
THE word torpedo can be traced back to the Latin verb
torpere, meaning stiff, motionless or numb — the source of our words torpor and torpid.
Torpedo entered English in the 1520s as a name for the fish, the electric ray.
The term’s use for a device to blow up enemy ships is first recorded in 1776. It was coined by American inventor Robert Fulton, who designed an explosive charge for warships, named after the electric ray’s ability to incapacitate prey.
Fulton’s weapon wasn’t a modern self-propelled torpedo, but a sort of floating mine to be dragged into contact with an enemy vessel by a submarine.
The first self- propelled torpedo was perfected in 1866 by Englishman Robert Whitehead. It was a cigarshaped device, driven by a compressed-air engine.
Many navies procured the Whitehead torpedo in the 1870s. It proved itself in the RussoTurkish War when, on January 26, 1878, Russian torpedo boats used Whiteheads to sink the Turkish ship Intibah. Graeme Beech, Truro, Cornwall. QUESTION In the Ian McEwan novel Nutshell, the narrator of the story is an unborn baby. Has any other novel used this plot device? ANOTHER book that uses this device is The View From Here by Brian Keith Jackson (1998), much of which is narrated by Li’l Lisa, who speaks five months into her mother Anna’s pregnancy with her.
Lisa’s family are poor AfricanAmericans from Mississippi. Lisa knows her father, J. T., with five sons already, has arranged to give her to Clariece, his barren and unpleasant sister.
J. T. — who was raised by Clariece — was so bullied by her that he can’t recognise her poisonous character. Anna prays that J. T. will come to his senses when the child is born.
Elaine Godson, Leicester.