With the advent of entire families of new weapons before and during the First World War, floating mines came into their own as a deadly and relatively cheap weapon. Navies began to lay dozens to hundreds of mines in belts intended to discourage enemy ships form venturing into certain defensive swaths of the seas. The solution to these hidden or lurking floating bombs was the development of the mine sweeper - a smaller vessel which could venture into mined waters and not only avoid the mines but harvest them and disarm or explode them harmlessly.