id to have been made in 1911 by an
Italian, Captain Guidoni, who made use of a Farman machine, and released
from it a torpedo weighing 352 pounds. In the same year the little group
of naval officers who were superintending the construction of the
_Mayfly_ at Barrow-in-Furness had many discussions on the subject. One
of them, Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson, subsequently drafted a paper on
torpedo aircraft, with some rough sketches; in 1913 a design was got out
at the Admiralty, and in the same year Mr. Sopwith constructed two
sample machines. From this time onward the hope of using the torpedo,
launched from the air, against ships which are sheltered and protected
from naval attack, was never long absent from the minds of those who
directed the activities of the Royal Naval Air Service. It was this
hope, more than anything else, which inspired the production of larger
seaplanes and higher powered engines. At the naval review of July 1914,
a Short seaplane of 160 horse-power had been fitted, in a temporary
fashion, to carry a 14-inch torpedo weighing 810 pounds. With the same
end in view, after the war broke out, the principal manufacturers of
motor-cars were encouraged to develop air engines of high power,
especially the Sunbeam engine of 225 horse-power, and the Rolls-Royce
engine, which played so distinguished a part in the war. When H.M.S.
_Engadine_ was fitted out as a carrier in the first month of the war, it
was expressly stated by the Admiralty that her business was to carry
torpedo seaplanes to the scene of action. Later on, at Gallipoli,
seaplanes shipped in the _Ben my Chree_ succeeded in flying across the
Isthmus of Bulair and in torpedoing a merchant ship on the shore of the
Sea of Marmara, an ammunition ship at Ak Bashi Liman, and a steam tug in
the Straits.

All this seemed full of promise. The modern torpedo is a very efficient
weapon, and the problem of designing an aeroplane or seaplane to carry
it was a problem requiring adaptation rather than new invention. Yet the
development of torpedo aircraft during the war was, in the words of an
official memorandum, 'astonishingly slow'. After the Gallipoli exploits
nothing of importance in this kind was achieved during the years that
followed, until the very end of the war.

The causes of this disappointment were many. In the first place the
seaplane, which seems almost as if it had been designed to carry a
torpedo suspended between its floats, was itself a disappoint