Opening the event, Rijeka City Museum director Ervin Dubrovic said the exhibition also showed the technological achievements stemming from torpedo production and the current attempts to open a museum dedicated to torpedoes and the city's other industries.
He recalled that in 1860 Rijeka resident Giovanni Biagio Luppis conceived an explosive device called "coast guardian" which would move on its own and be guided from the coast. Robert Whitehead, an English engineer and director of Rijeka's metal products factory, initially in cooperation with Luppis and then on its own, developed a new type of weapon based on Luppis's idea, the torpedo. He presented it to an Austrian Navy commission in 1866. In Rijeka, torpedoes were produced up to 1966.