Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode.
Speaker 1: And this episode is titled tech Stuff Is Under Siege.
Speaker 1: And I had to look it up just to make
Speaker 1: sure that it wasn't about that one Stephen Sagal movie.
Speaker 2: It is not.
Speaker 3: It is about siege engines, as in the giant types
Speaker 3: of military hardware used in the Middle Ages and thereabouts
Speaker 3: in order to lay siege to a fortified position, typically
Speaker 3: something like a castle or fortress. This episode originally published
Speaker 3: on April twelfth, twenty seventeen. Hope you enjoy today.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about siege in I thought it'd
Speaker 1: be kind of fun and sort of in the theme
Speaker 1: of looking back on history.
Speaker 2: Well, what is a siege engine? While it's a device meant.
Speaker 1: To allow an attacking army to gain entry to a
Speaker 1: fortified space, typically a fortified city or a castle, something
Speaker 1: along those lines, they're used to penetrate or destroy fortress
Speaker 1: walls or gates, and they tend to be enormous and
Speaker 1: they exert tremendous force in their operation. I'm going to
Speaker 1: focus on siege engines from ancient times to medieval history,
Speaker 1: but you should know that siege engines continued to evolve
Speaker 1: even after medieval era, even after the invention of gunpowder
Speaker 1: and the distribution of gunpowder. To be fair, gunpowder had
Speaker 1: been invented for a very long time before anyone over
Speaker 1: in medieval Europe figured out how to use it as
Speaker 1: a means for weaponry. And also, gunpowder ended up making
Speaker 1: a lot of the traditional city defenses ineffective. I'll talk
Speaker 1: about that more later on in this episode, but siege
Speaker 1: engines were used in both world Wars, actually, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to save that for a different episode. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about the old stuff, this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: you might see in a movie about knights and royalty
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. So siege weapons were necessary to
Speaker 1: penetrate a fortified position, typically, like I said, a city
Speaker 1: or a castle. So why would you lay siege to
Speaker 1: such a place at all. Essentially, it's an effort to
Speaker 1: make the people inside surrender to the people outside. It
Speaker 1: seems pretty simple. Usually the people inside would include someone
Speaker 1: of importance who kind of had the authority to hand
Speaker 1: over the rule of law for that region to somebody else.
Speaker 1: And the word siege comes from a Latin word sidare,
Speaker 1: which means to sit, And that's pretty much what a
Speaker 1: sieging force does. It sits outside a fortified area and
Speaker 1: it waits. It also usually attempts to cut off supplies
Speaker 1: that are heading into the foried location, both food and
Speaker 1: water and other things, to push the people inside to
Speaker 1: the point of desperation so that they surrender. But sometimes
Speaker 1: a long wait just isn't convenient. You got places to go,
Speaker 1: people to meet, lands to conquer, so you can't really
Speaker 1: wait around for people to eat that last apple or
Speaker 1: to draw the last water from the well. You got
Speaker 1: to find a way to speed things up a little bit.
Speaker 1: You got to convince them that they need to give up,
Speaker 1: and maybe force them to give up, and that requires
Speaker 1: getting access to the place that's fortified. Thus seize engines. Now,
Speaker 1: archaeologists have uncovered evidence of fortified city walls from ancient
Speaker 1: cities all around the world, and in a way, you
Speaker 1: could say that human history is marked by innovations in
Speaker 1: ways to keep people safe and other innovations designed to
Speaker 1: overcome those protections. It gets a pretty grim when you
Speaker 1: start thinking about specifics and you get down to brass tacks,
Speaker 1: as it were. But if ancient people had fortified walls,
Speaker 1: what did the ancient attackers use to breach those walls. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of different tactics that don't involve
Speaker 1: seize engines at all. For example, you might try and
Speaker 1: use fire to weaken walls. You might tunnel under walls,
Speaker 1: either to collapse the wall so that they just fall down,
Speaker 1: or you end up just bypassing the wall entirely in
Speaker 1: tunnel into the place that you're trying to get access to.
Speaker 1: Or you might just use ladders to try and access
Speaker 1: the top of the wall and scale it. Obviously, that
Speaker 1: could be dangerous if there are soldiers up at the
Speaker 1: top of the wall to push the ladders down. So
Speaker 1: you've got to hope that you can zerg rush it
Speaker 1: use a whole bunch of people all at once. If
Speaker 1: you don't know what a zerg rush is, you need
Speaker 1: to go listen to the Tech Memes episode that published
Speaker 1: not too long ago. So the ancients would start to
Speaker 1: construct massive tools to break through barriers. These are the
Speaker 1: siege engines. They're bigger than things like just a tunnel
Speaker 1: or a ladder. And arguably the oldest version of the
Speaker 1: siege engine is the battering ram. So I'm sure you're
Speaker 1: all familiar with the concept, but just in case. A
Speaker 1: battering ram is a large mass that can be swung
Speaker 1: so that it has its impact against a surface and
Speaker 1: that causes that surface to become damaged. In other words,
Speaker 1: it's like an enormous hammer breaking through a wall or
Speaker 1: a door. And an example could be just an enormous log,
Speaker 1: and the earliest battering rams were held by people, but
Speaker 1: that was problematic. People can only hold weight up to
Speaker 1: a certain limit and then it's just too heavy to move.
Speaker 1: It slows them down and they remain unprotected and can
Speaker 1: be picked off by archers or people with slings or
Speaker 1: other projectiles. So you want to improve upon this idea.
Speaker 1: So another example would be a log that is hung
Speaker 1: from a wooden frame by various ropes, and the ropes
Speaker 1: allow the log to swing horizontally so that the end
Speaker 1: can crash into that vertical surface like a.
Speaker 2: Wall or a gate.
Speaker 1: This would allow you to have a much heavier battering
Speaker 1: ram than something you would have to carry by hand,
Speaker 1: because you could put it on this rope system and
Speaker 1: just swing it and as opposed to having to lift it.
Speaker 2: According to ancient.
Speaker 1: Historians, the earliest example of this technology was the brainchild
Speaker 1: of a certain Pefrasminos of Tire, And I apologize for
Speaker 1: absolutely butchering the pronunciation of that name, because I'm certain
Speaker 1: I did. Anyway, This particular engineer would have lived sometime
Speaker 1: between five hundred and three hundred and fifty BCE, and
Speaker 1: his main invention was suspending a cross beam from a
Speaker 1: transverse beam for the purposes of swinging it as a
Speaker 1: battering ram. In other words, that design I was talking
Speaker 1: about hanging a wooden beam in a frame so that
Speaker 1: you can bash down a wall or a door. Now,
Speaker 1: typically you would also find that the frames holding these
Speaker 1: battering rams would be shielded by a roof, and often
Speaker 1: that roof would be covered with dampened animal skins. That
Speaker 1: would help cut down on the potential for fire. If
Speaker 1: your defending city was using flaming arrows or burning oil
Speaker 1: or something along those lines, it would reduce the possibility
Speaker 1: that your brand new, shiny battering ram would just become kindling.
Speaker 1: And you would also protect yourself from other just basic
Speaker 1: projectiles and allow the operators of the battering ram to
Speaker 1: continue hammering against the wall or the door.
Speaker 2: Obviously, this was risky.
Speaker 1: You had to get access to the actual wall, and
Speaker 1: according to Vitruvius, who was an author and engineered the
Speaker 1: first century, the first person to create a fireproofed roofed
Speaker 1: battering ram was Keros the Carthaginian, sometimes called Geros with
Speaker 1: a G the Carthaginian. Modern historians believe this person was
Speaker 1: alive sometime around the fifth century BCE, and this was
Speaker 1: after the Iron Age that had happened several hundred years earlier.
Speaker 1: So it was very common for the attacking party to
Speaker 1: cap a battering ram with a large iron or otherwise
Speaker 1: metal cap, often shaped in the form of a battering
Speaker 1: ram like a literal ram, like a goat's head with horns.
Speaker 1: The iron would give the battering ram even more weight
Speaker 1: and resilience, and it would make it more effective. The
Speaker 1: animals would, you know, forms made it look more interesting,
Speaker 1: but they also could help with bashing through the material,
Speaker 1: depending upon the shapes you were using. And yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a pretty effective means of knocking down your basic
Speaker 1: city walls. You also would see other improvements like pulley
Speaker 1: systems that would allow the battering ram to remain horizontal
Speaker 1: as it swung instead of tilting upward. So imagine a
Speaker 1: swing set swing. You know, when you're swinging on a swing,
Speaker 1: your feet tilt up in the air instead of staying
Speaker 1: horizontal unless you're actively moving your legs down, and the
Speaker 1: pulley system would counteract that tendency so that way you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be hitting the wall or door on an upward swing.
Speaker 1: It would be translated into a horizontal motion, so that
Speaker 1: that momentum that you're transferring would be in the proper direction.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're talking about. The working principle behind
Speaker 1: the battering ram is the transfer of momentum. Momentum quick
Speaker 1: recap for people who don't remember their physics. It's the
Speaker 1: quantity of motion and a moving body. And the way
Speaker 1: you arrive at the quantity of momentum is by multiplying
Speaker 1: the mass of a moving body by its velocity, So
Speaker 1: that means momentum of a small object that's moving very
Speaker 1: very very fast can be the same as a large
Speaker 1: object moving much more slowly if the numbers work out
Speaker 1: the right way. But if something is really big and
Speaker 1: really fast. It has a whole lot of momentum to it,
Speaker 1: and I've got some funny stories about momentum. I had
Speaker 1: to explain this to a friend of mine at the
Speaker 1: Renaissance Festival. There was a moment in a dance, a
Speaker 1: dance in which it is possible to steal the partner
Speaker 1: of another person, in which I was trying to steal
Speaker 1: the queen from the king. The king being played by
Speaker 1: a guy who looked an awful lot like Henry the Eighth,
Speaker 1: including Henry the Eighth's impressive mass. Fellow collided with me.
Speaker 1: He gave me a little hip check, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: moving fast, but he did outweigh me by a significant amount,
Speaker 1: and so I went flying, And thus the transfer of
Speaker 1: momentum was demonstrated in a very real and ultimately painful way.
Speaker 1: I have since forgiven him. It actually was pretty funny,
Speaker 1: but I did sprain both my wrist and my ankle
Speaker 1: in that incident. So with battering rams, your desired outcome
Speaker 1: is to have a very large mass, and you want
Speaker 1: it to move really quickly so that you can result
Speaker 1: in this large amount of momentum that you transfer to
Speaker 1: a stationary object like the wall or the gate and
Speaker 1: thus cause.
Speaker 2: Damage to it.
Speaker 1: So once battering rams started getting better, obviously cities needed
Speaker 1: to respond and they began to reinforce their walls, making
Speaker 1: them thicker at the base and trying to create new
Speaker 1: strategies to repel battering ram assaults. My favorite battering ram
Speaker 1: is actually a fictional one, like Grand Grand was the
Speaker 1: battering ram in Lord of the Rings. It was from
Speaker 1: Sauron's army. They used it in the siege on Minas Tirith,
Speaker 1: and it was one hundred feet long and had a
Speaker 1: metal cap that was shaped like a wolf, and in
Speaker 1: most of the depictions I've seen, the wolf has also
Speaker 1: got some sort of fire or lava coming out of
Speaker 1: its mouth, making it pretty intimidating.
Speaker 2: Awesome image. Really.
Speaker 1: Another ancient siege engine similar to this in the sense
Speaker 1: that you had to get super close to your target,
Speaker 1: was the siege tower. This is a pretty simple concept.
Speaker 1: It's usually it's like a tower that's on wheels, and
Speaker 1: you push this tower up against the city wall that
Speaker 1: you want to you want to get past, and you
Speaker 1: have a gang plank at the top of the tower
Speaker 1: that you lower so that it rests on the city wall,
Speaker 1: and then your force just goes through the siege tower,
Speaker 1: across the gang plank and into the city and you
Speaker 1: bipe past the wall. Entirely very basic idea. Obviously, things
Speaker 1: could go wrong. The tower if it were set on fire,
Speaker 1: could end up causing you to lose quite a few
Speaker 1: of your men.
Speaker 2: And also there.
Speaker 1: Are lots of different ways to create obstacles to make
Speaker 1: it more difficult to get the tower up against a
Speaker 1: city wall.
Speaker 2: One of those would be.
Speaker 1: Moats, So your basic moat around a castle was really
Speaker 1: a defense against siege engines. Like this, it meant that
Speaker 1: it was much harder to get something like a siege
Speaker 1: tower up against the castle walls because you had to
Speaker 1: get across the moat first, and the moat might either
Speaker 1: be dry or it could be filled with water. Not
Speaker 1: all moats were water. In fact, most of them weren't.
Speaker 1: Most of them were essentially just a very big ditch
Speaker 1: around the fortified area, so you would have to find
Speaker 1: a way to bridge that gap if you were an
Speaker 1: attacker to allow your siege engine to roll over the moat,
Speaker 1: So you had to build like essentially a temporary bridge
Speaker 1: to allow the siege engine to roll over it and
Speaker 1: get access to the city wall, and another defense was
Speaker 1: to redesign city walls. In the first place, Engineers began
Speaker 1: to make walls that were very thick at the base
Speaker 1: and would slope from the top down to the base,
Speaker 1: and that slope meant that the top of the wall
Speaker 1: would be further away from a tower than the base
Speaker 1: of the wall because it sloped away from the outside.
Speaker 1: So that meant that your gang plank had to be
Speaker 1: longer in order to reach from the siege tower to
Speaker 1: the top of the city wall. And gang planks were
Speaker 1: really the weak points of the siege towers. Assuming that
Speaker 1: you've major siege tower as fireproof as you can manage,
Speaker 1: which again mostly involved putting the hides of animals on
Speaker 1: the outside of the tower and wetting them down, drenching
Speaker 1: them in water as much as you possibly can. Then,
Speaker 1: once you set down the gang plank and you have
Speaker 1: attackers going across, their most vulnerable when they are on
Speaker 1: that gang plank. They're standing over the height of the wall.
Speaker 1: There's probably a moat below them. The gang plank's probably
Speaker 1: not incredibly sturdy or stable. So the further away the
Speaker 1: top of the siege tower is from the top of
Speaker 1: the wall, the harder it is for the attackers to
Speaker 1: get over. So that was just a basic defense mechanism,
Speaker 1: was to build these sloping walls for cities to help
Speaker 1: protect against siege engines. Now, both siege towers and battering
Speaker 1: rams were made obsolete by the invention of cannons later on.
Speaker 1: I'll talk about cannons toward the end of this episode.
Speaker 1: Cannons actually made those high city walls obsolete in the
Speaker 1: first place. Higher walls were more vulnerable to cannon fire,
Speaker 1: and so the design of city fortifications had to completely
Speaker 1: change once those became a major element in warfare. At
Speaker 1: that point, those siege engines began to fade into history.
Speaker 1: You didn't really see them anymore. But I'll get more
Speaker 1: into cannons a little bit later in the episode. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've already noted that the major disadvantage to
Speaker 1: both battering rams and siege towers is that you have
Speaker 1: to get close to your target for them to work.
Speaker 1: If the defending city has set up other defenses like
Speaker 1: those trenches or pits or spikes, and they have stuff
Speaker 1: like hot oil or flaming weapons, getting close isn't terribly attractive.
Speaker 1: You would much prefer to batter the city from a distance,
Speaker 1: and so attackers began to design new engines, things that
Speaker 1: could allow attacks for much further away.
Speaker 2: So next I'll.
Speaker 1: Talk about some of the massive projectile weapons that were used,
Speaker 1: and they relied purely on mechanical physics to hurl objects
Speaker 1: at walls.
Speaker 2: They're pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Before I do that, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. So the first project al seize engine
Speaker 1: I really want to talk about is the ballista. And
Speaker 1: if you were to take a casual glance at a blista,
Speaker 1: you might think it's an enormous crossbow, and it does
Speaker 1: resemble a crossbow. But they crossbow and the ballista work
Speaker 1: on two different principles, two different types of tension. The
Speaker 1: operation of the ballista depends upon two torsion springs, whereas
Speaker 1: the crossbow depends upon the natural tension of the bow itself.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about torsion springs. Torsion springs work by twisting.
Speaker 1: They store mechanical energy when you twist the torsion spring,
Speaker 1: and when you release the spring, it unleashes that mechanical
Speaker 1: energy through untwisting, So it's winding and unwinding when you
Speaker 1: wind it up. You've got the mechanical energy, and when
Speaker 1: you let it go, it unwinds itself and releases that
Speaker 1: mechanical energy.
Speaker 2: To make a.
Speaker 1: Ballista, you need a pair of torsion springs that you
Speaker 1: can twist tightly so that when you release them, they
Speaker 1: unleash that mechanical force in such a way as to
Speaker 1: throw a projectile, typically a large dart with an iron
Speaker 1: tip at a target. Now, in ancient times, a torsion
Speaker 1: spring might look like a loop of some stretchy elastic material.
Speaker 1: That material was often either hair from animals sometimes humans,
Speaker 1: all woven together to make really strong ropes, or sometimes
Speaker 1: it was ligaments and other tissue that was turned into
Speaker 1: this kind of elastic material and then looped around a
Speaker 1: frame like a skein that's inside a frame. So imagine
Speaker 1: a loop of material. In fact, just imagine a rubber band,
Speaker 1: and imagine that you've got two pegs that are a
Speaker 1: few inches apart from each other. They're further apart than
Speaker 1: the length of the rubber band, so you have to
Speaker 1: stretch the rubber band a little bit to loop either
Speaker 1: end over the two pegs. Put more rubber bands that
Speaker 1: are the same length over those two pegs, so you've
Speaker 1: got a few of them, maybe four or five. These
Speaker 1: rubber bands represent an unwound torsion spring. If you then
Speaker 1: inserted a throwing arm, what would be considered like the
Speaker 1: shaft of a throwing arm, into that gap the middle
Speaker 1: of all those rubber bands, and then use it to
Speaker 1: twist the rubber bands in a circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise,
Speaker 1: you would create the torsion. This twisted tension. You loop
Speaker 1: them over and over again. You can do this with
Speaker 1: a pencil, so again, just have a rubber band. You
Speaker 1: can even have maybe someone stand in front of you
Speaker 1: putting their two thumbs up, and you loop the rubber
Speaker 1: bands around their two thumbs so that they're stretching them together.
Speaker 1: You put a pencil in there. You twist the pencil
Speaker 1: around a few times so that it's twisting the rubber bands,
Speaker 1: and you'll start building up that tension. If you let
Speaker 1: go of the pencil, then it will unleash all that
Speaker 1: mechanical energy and it'll make the pencil flip around like crazy.
Speaker 1: Make sure you use an unsharpened pencil, and be very
Speaker 1: careful with this sort of stuff because it might fly
Speaker 1: up and hit you in the face. But this is
Speaker 1: the basic principle of the ballista. Now, with the ballista,
Speaker 1: you have two of these torsion springs, and that meant
Speaker 1: that they're actually vertically aligned, not horizontally aligned. In other words,
Speaker 1: you would have imagine you have one thumb higher than
Speaker 1: the other thumb directly in front of you, and you
Speaker 1: put the rubber bands on so that you were holding
Speaker 1: the loop that way.
Speaker 2: That's the way the ballista.
Speaker 1: Torsion springs are aligned. You have to have those that
Speaker 1: vertical alignment, and they're parallel to each other. And between
Speaker 1: the two torsion springs you have your stock or channel.
Speaker 1: That's where the projectile moves through. So with a crossbow,
Speaker 1: this would be where the bolt would slide through as
Speaker 1: it's being launched from the crossbow. Same sort of thing
Speaker 1: with a ballista. It's got that stock with a channel
Speaker 1: in it. That's where the projectile moves through it, and
Speaker 1: it's between these two vertically aligned torsion springs. So you've
Speaker 1: got your enormous dart loaded into your blista, and you've
Speaker 1: got your two vertically aligned torsion springs. In each torsion spring,
Speaker 1: you have a throwing arm. Now the torsion spring on
Speaker 1: the left side is wound counterclockwise if you were looking
Speaker 1: at it from above. That means that when the tension releases,
Speaker 1: it's going to spin its throwing arm in a clockwise direction.
Speaker 1: The torsion spring on the right side is the opposite.
Speaker 1: It's wound clockwise, so that when you release the tension,
Speaker 1: it will spin the throwing arm counterclockwise. And on the
Speaker 1: opposite end of the throwing arm, you have a line
Speaker 1: attaching the two together, a rope if you will, or
Speaker 1: a string. This rope is looped around the end of
Speaker 1: your projectile. This is the thing that's going to transfer
Speaker 1: the force to the projectile and make it fly at
Speaker 1: your target. So just imagine you've got this crossbow looking
Speaker 1: thing in front of you. The two arms of the
Speaker 1: ballista in its rest position you haven't wound it yet,
Speaker 1: are extended outward to the side, so the left one
Speaker 1: is almost parallel with the front of the ballista, the
Speaker 1: right one is almost parallel with the ballista, and you
Speaker 1: have a device called a windless. The windless is what
Speaker 1: allows you to crank back those arms. It's creating tension
Speaker 1: in those torsion springs, so it starts to twist the
Speaker 1: torsion springs, and as a result, the two throwing arms
Speaker 1: start tilting back towards you. It's they bend backwards, although
Speaker 1: the torsion the throwing arms themselves are not bending, it's
Speaker 1: just the torsion springs are rotating as you're twisting them, so.
Speaker 2: They've bend backward.
Speaker 1: Now that means that you start getting slack in that
Speaker 1: rope that's between the two ends of the throwing arms.
Speaker 1: You can use that slack to put it behind your projectile.
Speaker 1: And when you release the tension on those torsion springs,
Speaker 1: they untwist. That pulls the throwing arms forward, and that
Speaker 1: pulls that rope forward as well, transferring the energy to
Speaker 1: your projectile and shooting it at your target. It's pretty
Speaker 1: cool to see this, I mean, it's interesting to see
Speaker 1: this as two torsion springs as opposed to a crossbow,
Speaker 1: which would just use the tension of the material itself,
Speaker 1: the wood, if you will, of the bow. It's all
Speaker 1: due to mechanical physics. You don't need any chemicals to
Speaker 1: do this kind of seige engine, and you could also
Speaker 1: just build this thing when you needed it. In fact,
Speaker 1: most seiege engines were constructed at site the siege was happening.
Speaker 1: Because they were so big and heavy that moving them
Speaker 1: from one place across country to another place was not
Speaker 1: really practical. So usually we just go to the closest forest,
Speaker 1: cut down some logs, and have some workers start to
Speaker 1: build seage engines right there on site, wheel them into
Speaker 1: place so that they're generally pointed at the thing you
Speaker 1: want to shoot at, and then you start firing. And
Speaker 1: the blista was an early version of that. The earliest
Speaker 1: ones were in the BCE era. You would later see
Speaker 1: them go all the way up through the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1: They were, however, not terribly mobile. You could put wheels
Speaker 1: on the cart for a ballista so that you could
Speaker 1: at least wheel them into place, but it wasn't It's
Speaker 1: not like you could easily move them once you planted them.
Speaker 1: They were pretty much stationary once you were firing, and
Speaker 1: that meant that they were pretty attractive targets. They were
Speaker 1: very accurate, but they didn't hurl things at incredible distances.
Speaker 1: You can get a decent distance with them, but they
Speaker 1: fired in a very low arc like. Essentially it was
Speaker 1: a straight line from the ballista to the target. It
Speaker 1: kind of came out horizontally that way, it didn't fire
Speaker 1: in an arc the way catapults and tribuchatse did, and
Speaker 1: it also did comparatively less damage than catapults and tribuchase,
Speaker 1: largely because the projectiles it fired didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of mass to them compared to the rocks that you
Speaker 1: could fire from a catapult or a tribuchet. And like
Speaker 1: I said, crossbows or bows in general work in a
Speaker 1: very similar way, but this case it's just tension of
Speaker 1: the material itself as opposed to a torsion spring, So
Speaker 1: it's your basic spring action, but it's the actual tension
Speaker 1: of the wood itself. Torsion springs are also very important
Speaker 1: in other types of seize engines, particularly different types of catapults. Now,
Speaker 1: the nomenclature here it gets a little confusing because a
Speaker 1: lot of people use the word catapult to refer to
Speaker 1: a very specific type of siege engine, and other people
Speaker 1: use catapult to describe an entire family of siege engines,
Speaker 1: including ballista in some cases. But essentially, catapults were meant
Speaker 1: to hurl massive objects through the air. So in order
Speaker 1: to avoid confusion, I'm going to talk about the manganel
Speaker 1: and the trebuchet, which are often both lumped under the
Speaker 1: general category of catapult, but they operate in very different ways.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the manganel, which was invented before
Speaker 1: the tribuchet. The manganel was a siege engine of the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, so it came into development after the ballista.
Speaker 1: Ballista were still being used in siegees at that time,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of like a one armed ballista but
Speaker 1: popped on its side. So the ballista looks like a crossbow,
Speaker 1: which has the horizontal bow, but if you were to
Speaker 1: wheel an actual bow, like the kind you fire arrows from,
Speaker 1: you would hold it vertically. Well, the manganel is like that.
Speaker 1: It's vertical, but it only has one arm. You don't
Speaker 1: have a lower half to it. There's just the throwing
Speaker 1: arm and the torsion spring, and the torsion spring is
Speaker 1: aligned horizontally instead of vertically, so it's like that first
Speaker 1: example of the rubber bands I was talking about, where
Speaker 1: you're holding your thumbs side by side as the torsion spring.
Speaker 1: Same thing with the manganel. So the throwing arm when
Speaker 1: it's in its rest position is vertical more or less
Speaker 1: there's actually typically a stop so that it can't go
Speaker 1: completely vertical. It'll usually be at a pretty high angle.
Speaker 1: When you wind the torsion spring, you pull the throwing
Speaker 1: arm back until it's practically horizontal, and then you latch
Speaker 1: it in some way so that it stores that mechanical energy.
Speaker 1: It doesn't just release it. You load your manganel, typically
Speaker 1: with heavy stuff, and then you release the torsion spring
Speaker 1: and that twists back to the rest position, which means
Speaker 1: the throwing arm goes vertical and releases its projectile.
Speaker 2: So a manganel could have this bowl like end.
Speaker 1: To it, and that's where you would put your various projectiles.
Speaker 1: They might be rocks or fire pots, or, at least
Speaker 1: according to some accounts, dead stuff. The dead stuff was
Speaker 1: meant to hurt defenders in two ways. First, it's pretty
Speaker 1: psychologically devastating to have corpses thrown at you, true story. Second,
Speaker 1: it was thought of as a way to introduce disease
Speaker 1: into a fortified location, so it's a kind of biological warfare.
Speaker 1: You just throw bloated corpses into a city. It's pretty gross,
Speaker 1: and the whole idea was just to weaken defenses and
Speaker 1: also increase the chance that the defenders would just give up,
Speaker 1: like they're throwing dead stuff at us. Let's just run
Speaker 1: out the white flag and stop this. The Manganel fired
Speaker 1: projectiles at high velocity and at a low arc, so
Speaker 1: it was a higher arc than the ballista, which again
Speaker 1: was pretty much a straight line, so there was a
Speaker 1: slight arc to it.
Speaker 2: But it was still fairly low.
Speaker 1: It would aim stuff at walls, not typically over walls.
Speaker 1: It could hurl heavier and therefore more devastating projectiles than
Speaker 1: the ballista, but it was also less accurate than the
Speaker 1: ballista was it was meant to destroy defensive structures rather
Speaker 1: than go around them. If you look at the arc
Speaker 1: of projectiles from siege engines, ballista are the lowest, Manganels
Speaker 1: would be next, and then tribuchetes would be nice high
Speaker 1: arcs now. According to the resources I looked at, manganels
Speaker 1: could hurl projectiles as far as thirteen hundred feet, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty fair distance to throw a massive stone
Speaker 1: using pure mechanical power. And like other seas engines, the
Speaker 1: real genius behind the manganel was that it was pretty
Speaker 1: simple to construct. You could again just build it on
Speaker 1: location next I will talk about trebuchets and then lead
Speaker 1: it with some cannon talk. But before I get into
Speaker 1: all of that, let's take another quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors, and now to talk.
Speaker 2: About the Tributet.
Speaker 1: It was a very different beast than the Manganel. It
Speaker 1: was named after a word in Old French which means
Speaker 1: to throw over, and that's kind of what.
Speaker 2: The tribute did.
Speaker 1: It threw projectiles in a high arc that could be
Speaker 1: used to attack defensive walls or just bypass the walls
Speaker 1: completely and hurl payloads into fortified cities. Having massive rocks
Speaker 1: raining down on your homes is a powerful motivator when
Speaker 1: it comes time to consider surrender. The Tributeha didn't depend
Speaker 1: upon torsion springs the way Ballista and Menganelles did. Instead,
Speaker 1: it used a massive counterweight to provide the mechanical force
Speaker 1: to hurl payloads. So it's essentially a lever or if
Speaker 1: you prefer a seesaw, so think of a seesaw, but
Speaker 1: it has a long end and a short end. The
Speaker 1: counterweight is on the short end and the long end
Speaker 1: is what hurls the payload. So seesaws are a pretty
Speaker 1: good analogy. If you have a seesaw balanced in the center,
Speaker 1: two identical weights will balance out. You put two kids
Speaker 1: on there, the weigh the same. The seesaw's right there
Speaker 1: in the middle. They should even out and just balance
Speaker 1: each other. But if you move the seesaw so that
Speaker 1: the pivot point is off center, then the equal weights
Speaker 1: on either end will change the actual orientation of the seesaw.
Speaker 1: The shorter end will end up sticking up in the
Speaker 1: air and the longer end will rest against the ground. Now,
Speaker 1: because your typical treviche uses a short arm to hold
Speaker 1: the counterweight, that means by this little experiment we just
Speaker 1: talked about, you would actually need a lot more weight
Speaker 1: in the counterweight than you're going to have in the payload. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: your payload just is going to sit on the ground
Speaker 1: and the counterweight would just dangle in the air.
Speaker 2: It would not have the weight.
Speaker 1: Sufficient enough to pull the lever so that it flings
Speaker 1: your payload at your enemy. The counterweight was also typically hinged,
Speaker 1: meaning that it could swing around on the end of
Speaker 1: this short side of the tribute shay beam.
Speaker 2: That allows it.
Speaker 1: To swing around so it doesn't risk hitting the ground
Speaker 1: and mucking everything up. It's kind of like a ferris
Speaker 1: wheel ride. The compartments on a farris wheel are hinged
Speaker 1: so that people inside the ride are always in an
Speaker 1: upright orientation with regard to the ground. The same is
Speaker 1: true for tribute shay counterweights, at least with most of them.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Now, the huge throwing arm hurls payloads that are placed
Speaker 1: in a sling, so it's not like it has a
Speaker 1: bowl at the end of it, the way a manganel did,
Speaker 1: at least not your typical tribute shay.
Speaker 2: Typically you would.
Speaker 1: Use a sling instead. So if you don't know what
Speaker 1: a sling is, imagine a pocket and you have two
Speaker 1: sides of this pocket with chords coming from those two sides,
Speaker 1: one cord on each side, and typically the way you
Speaker 1: would use a sling, As you put a rock in
Speaker 1: the sling, you swing the sling around your head, you
Speaker 1: let go of one of the chords while holding on
Speaker 1: to the other one, and that releases the rock, slinging
Speaker 1: it at your target, hopefully and not behind you unless
Speaker 1: you're me, in which case it goes wherever it wants
Speaker 1: to go. Because I can't use a sling in.
Speaker 2: A tribute shay.
Speaker 1: One of those two chords is permanently attached to the
Speaker 1: long end of the arm, so you've got one end
Speaker 1: of the sling permanently affixed to the tribute shay the
Speaker 1: other cord. The other end has a large ring at
Speaker 1: the very end of it, and on the very end
Speaker 1: of the throwing arm itself there's a little projection called
Speaker 1: the finger that extends outward at a certain angle from
Speaker 1: the end of the beam. And by a certain angle,
Speaker 1: I mean you determine what the angle is when you
Speaker 1: build the tribute shape, so if you like it, you
Speaker 1: should have put a ring on it.
Speaker 2: So that's what you do with the tribute shay.
Speaker 1: You slide the sling's ring over the finger.
Speaker 2: So when you want to.
Speaker 1: Fire a payload, you have to raise the counterweight into
Speaker 1: the upright position and lock it in place, as typically
Speaker 1: you have a mechanism there to keep it from sliding
Speaker 1: back down or to swinging back down is the better
Speaker 1: way to say it. And then you load your sling
Speaker 1: with whatever your payload is, like a giant rock.
Speaker 2: You then take.
Speaker 1: The ring that's on one end and you slide it
Speaker 1: over the finger of the throwing arm. When you fire
Speaker 1: the tribute shay, you remove the block that allows the
Speaker 1: counterweight to or locks the counterweight in place. I should
Speaker 1: say this allows the counterweight to fall. It forces the
Speaker 1: short end of the lever down. The long end is
Speaker 1: forced upward, and as it moves upward, centrifugal force, which
Speaker 1: is not really a force, but never mind that centri
Speaker 1: centrifugal force pushes the sling outward. And so then as
Speaker 1: the arm moves through this arc, the ring on the
Speaker 1: end of that finger slips free once it hits the
Speaker 1: proper angle as you determined when you were building the
Speaker 1: tribu shape. When it slips free of the finger, it
Speaker 1: releases the payload, throwing it in that high arc, and
Speaker 1: it sails majestically overhead toward your target. And because the
Speaker 1: counterweight is heavy enough, it descends very quickly. So this
Speaker 1: means there's a very high increase in linear velocity for
Speaker 1: the throwing arm and thus the payload. The release angle
Speaker 1: of the payload is dependent upon the angle of the finger.
Speaker 1: That little projection, relatively little projection at the end of
Speaker 1: your tribute shap. So if you want to change the
Speaker 1: release angle, you changed the angle of the finger, and
Speaker 1: then the ring will come off at a different point
Speaker 1: in that arc, and thus the payload will fly in
Speaker 1: a different arc towards your target. Of course, you're probably
Speaker 1: not using perfectly uniform stones, so it's not an exact science.
Speaker 1: You might be using stones of slightly different weights, which
Speaker 1: means that that's gonna change the arc as well, but
Speaker 1: still the principle is fairly sound. And then we get
Speaker 1: to the invention, and more importantly, the employment of gunpowder
Speaker 1: in siege weaponry. Gunpowder was actually invented in Asia centuries
Speaker 1: before it became a useful tool in warfare, but it
Speaker 1: really wasn't until about the fifteenth century that you would
Speaker 1: see massive artillery guns regularly utilized in medieval Europe.
Speaker 2: There were a lot of earlier.
Speaker 1: Examples and a lot of historical accounts that at least
Speaker 1: say that canons were in use, although the definition of
Speaker 1: canon has changed dramatically over the centuries, so some of
Speaker 1: those accounts are difficult to verify, simply because the canon
Speaker 1: that's being referred to in one battle maybe a significantly
Speaker 1: different kind of weapon than one from another battle.
Speaker 2: There's definitely some.
Speaker 1: Evidence of canons being used in sieges, though, and in
Speaker 1: the One Hundred Years War in Northern France. England employed
Speaker 1: some canons in a battle in thirteen forty six. How
Speaker 1: many canons, Well, that kind of depends upon which historical
Speaker 1: account you believe. It's somewhere between five and twenty six.
Speaker 1: And the English won the battle. So was that because
Speaker 1: of the devastating power of their fully operational deaths I'm
Speaker 1: sorry canons. Probably not. In fact, the English canons likely
Speaker 1: did very little actual damage against the Genoese mercenaries they
Speaker 1: were fighting. The Genoese mercenaries were fighting on behalf of France,
Speaker 1: but it really scared the pantaloons off those guys, because
Speaker 1: the Genoese were really rattled by those loud, smoky weapons,
Speaker 1: and they were soundly defeated. But the actual defeat came
Speaker 1: at the hands of traditional English soldiers wielding stuff like
Speaker 1: swords and axes and bows, rather than the canons. And besides,
Speaker 1: that's not even really a siege, so I'm not really
Speaker 1: going to talk any more about it. By sixteen seventy
Speaker 1: you'd actually see the word canon being used to describe
Speaker 1: specific types of guns. Mounted guns, typically stationary ones like
Speaker 1: you could roll them into place, but they weren't meant
Speaker 1: to be moved around rapidly. The biggest one at that
Speaker 1: time was called the Canon Royal, and typically a Canon
Speaker 1: Royal would weigh around eight thousand pounds or three six
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty kilograms if you prefer and it could
Speaker 1: fire cannon balls weighing at around sixty three pounds or
Speaker 1: twenty eight kilograms. That's SIEV. Then you had whole Canon
Speaker 1: and Dimi cannon guns. Those were of decreasing size and
Speaker 1: weight and could fire smaller cannon balls, And by smaller
Speaker 1: I mean that the smallest got down to be about
Speaker 1: twenty eight pounds. They're still really heavy, particularly if you
Speaker 1: compare them to the types of Canon you'd find on
Speaker 1: sailing ships a century later.
Speaker 2: Eventually we would refer.
Speaker 1: To canon by the weight of the shot they fired.
Speaker 1: What kind of cannon ball would they fire? So if
Speaker 1: you hear about a ten pound gun, it meant that
Speaker 1: the shot it fired weighed ten pounds. The gun itself
Speaker 1: didn't weigh ten pounds, it weighed weigh more than that,
Speaker 1: but the cannon balls weighed ten pounds. So if you
Speaker 1: hear about a twenty pounder, that meant that the cannon
Speaker 1: balls weighed twenty pounds.
Speaker 2: So the bigger, the poundage.
Speaker 1: That just means the heavier the shot, and thus the
Speaker 1: more damage the canon would do if you hit what
Speaker 1: you were aiming at. Well, the canon made early your
Speaker 1: city defenses completely useless. High walls were not good protection
Speaker 1: against cannon fire, which typically fire in a pretty low
Speaker 1: arc at a very high velocity, so instead new defenses
Speaker 1: were invented. Essentially, new walls were built, and these were
Speaker 1: lower walls and thicker walls. Defensive walls were made to
Speaker 1: withstand high impacts from cannon fire, and because defenders would
Speaker 1: often have guns of their own, traditional methods of breaching
Speaker 1: walls were pretty bad choices. It doesn't make a whole
Speaker 1: lot of sense to wheel a siege engine slowly toward
Speaker 1: a wall if you're being fired upon by cannon, you'd
Speaker 1: be a sitting duck. So it completely changed warfare from
Speaker 1: that moment forward. You also saw other changes as well,
Speaker 1: from armor to swords and all sorts of stuff, all
Speaker 1: because gunpowder had entered the scene. Canons themselves are fascinating
Speaker 1: all the way, from the early bronze guns to the
Speaker 1: steel guns that redefined warfare yet again, But that warrants
Speaker 1: it's own episode. That was tech stuff is under Siege,
Speaker 1: which originally published April twelfth, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: I hope you enjoyed that.
Speaker 3: Hope you learned.
Speaker 1: Something about, you know, sort of an old kind of technology.
Speaker 1: I really enjoy doing those kinds of episodes, Like I
Speaker 1: love doing the stuff that's cutting edge and bleeding edge tech.
Speaker 1: I really like learning about that and talking about it.
Speaker 1: But I also like looking back on old technologies. It
Speaker 1: is unfortunate that a lot of old technologies were mostly
Speaker 1: dedicated to how to, you know, make someone else not
Speaker 1: be alive anymore. But you know, not all of them
Speaker 1: were like that, just a lot of them. So maybe
Speaker 1: I will look back and see if I can find
Speaker 1: some interesting technologies that were not meant to just hurt
Speaker 1: or may more kill people, but to do other things
Speaker 1: as well or instead, I guess I should say. And
Speaker 1: that would be fun to kind of look up some
Speaker 1: other old technologies because I'm missdoing those. It's been a
Speaker 1: while since I've done one. Hope you are all well,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
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