INVENTOR OR PLAGIARIST? MUDERRIS MEHMED SAKIR EFENDI’S NEWLY-INVENTED TORPEDOES

The Patent Law promulgated in 1880 during Abdulhamid II’s reign (1876-1909) chartered many inventors both local and foreign. Experts as well as enthusiastic amateurs were eager to benefit from these privileges. Muderris Mehmed ？akir Efendi was one of these amateur inventors. In order to solve a technical problem that he had encountered in a military textbook about the use of torpedoes, he designed two torpedo mechanisms which he called “sea bandits” and “deep sea torpedoes” respectively. He asserted that these two inventions allowed the use torpedoes in deep seas and helped to raise them safely from their location. In this study, the mechanisms “invented” by Mehmed ？akir Efendi will be introduced and discussed