USS Intrepid (1874)

The second USS Intrepid was one of two steam-powered torpedo rams (along with USS Alarm) that were ordered at the behest of Admiral David D. Porter in 1871. Porter, the influential seniormost officer in the U.S. Navy at the time, had been impressed by the potential of the spar torpedo during the American Civil War, and felt that this weapon could play a critical role in harbor and coastal defence as something capable of sinking a monitor, a powerful type of vessel that had nonetheless proven vulnerable below the waterline. Although a number of seemingly credible sources suggest that Intrepid was equipped with self-propelled torpedoes, many of these sources cite as their own source (or copy nearly verbatim) the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, which in fact makes no mention of self-propelled torpedoes, while other sources explicitly state that Intrepid was strictly a spar-torpedo vessel.

The ship appears to have spent all but a few months of her career docked at the New York Navy Yard, being decommissioned in 1882. An attempt to convert the vessel into a gunboat was halted in 1889, when surveyors determined that she was beyond economical repair. She was ultimately stricken and sold for scrap in 1892.