Torpedo Collection

Standing out among the rich holdings of the Croatian Maritime Museum in Split is the Torpedo Collection. It is indispensable for any relevant research and presentation of the development of torpedoes, which were, until the end of World War II, an unrivaled weapon in naval warfare. Moreover, these items used to make up a whole museum by themselves – the house museum of the Whitehead torpedo factory in Rijeka, founded in the second half of the 19^th century. After a whole century of production at the Rijeka factory, which was then called Torpedo, production was shut down in 1966. The Torpedo factory then donated the collection to the Military and Naval Museum in Split, whose holdings were inherited by the Croatian Maritime Museum in Split in 1997.

Today, the collection is presented in a modern fashion. Following the development of this weapon, emphasis is placed on the most valuable items from the Collection (a torpedo head from 1866 and a torpedo tail from 1868), the difficulties that such an invention faced and how Giovanni Luppis came up with the idea that Robert Whitehead would go on to further develop; in other words, how engineers overcame obstacles and perfected the torpedo.

Collection Manager: Ljubomir Radić, senior curator