October 1894: The aluminium torpedo boat

A visit to Engineer Towers 110 years ago would have caught our predecessors in a state of excitement most atypical of the Victorian gentlemen. London was aflap, it seems, over the exhibition of a boat in the Thames which appeared to defy the norms of military craft design. As yet unnamed, this was a torpedo boat which a Poplar-based shipbuilder called Yarrow & Co had built for the French Navy. “Ten tonnes with steam up and coal in the bunkers; twenty and a half knots speed; 300 horsepower. Ten years ago — perhaps five years ago — the man who suggested the possibility of producing a boat which could live in a sea and satisfy the conditions embodied in the lines above would have been regarded as a lunatic by those who had not watched the progress of events,” the journal expounded breathlessly.

The boat’s secret was that it was made from aluminium; indeed at 60ft (18.2m) long and 9ft3in (2.8m) across the beam it was not only the largest aluminium ship ever made at that point, it was the largest aluminium structure of any kind.