The compartment immediately behind the “steering chamber” contains the engines which are of the Brotherhood type, provided with _three_ single acting cylinders. The three-fold throw prevents any possibility of the engine getting on a “dead point.” Though this compartment is the shortest in the torpedo, the engines in the larger sizes are capable of indicating as much as thirty horse power. It has for simplicity been stated above that the pendulous weight and the balanced piston act by means of rods on the horizontal rudder; this was so in the early patterns of the torpedo, but it was soon found that they did not do so with sufficient steadiness and promptitude, and the force they could apply was in the larger and swifter forms quite ineffective. Nowadays the engine compartment always contains a little piece of apparatus which is an arrangement of cylinder and piston, upon which the compressed air acts in one or the other direction according to the way its slide-valve is moved. It is this slide-valve that the rods from the “steering chamber” move, and allow the force of the compressed air to turn the rudder up or down. This auxiliary apparatus has the same relation to the torpedo rudder that the steam-steering apparatus of a large vessel has to its rudder. Although it is only about a few inches long, its power and delicacy are such that the pressure of half an ounce on its slide admits to its piston a force equal to 160 lbs., and its introduction has given the torpedo the power of steadily steering itself. Behind the engine compartment, but completely shut off from it, is another almost empty division occupying a considerable part of the length of the torpedo, and known as the “buoyancy chamber.” But it contains, attached to the bottom of it, a certain amount of ballasting, so adjusted to balance the weights of the other parts that the whole floats horizontally, and at the same time preserving the tube in one vertical position as regards its transverse diameter, _i.e._, so that the horizontal rudder is always horizontal. The shaft from the engine passes through this compartment, as also the rod from the small motor that moves the horizontal rudder. These, of course, pass through water-tight bearings.