Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com, Hale and well met. This is
Speaker 1: tech stuff and I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, senior
Speaker 1: writer for how Stuff Works dot com. And many of
Speaker 1: you know that in my life outside of the office,
Speaker 1: I'm also the occasional Renaissance Festival performer. If you did
Speaker 1: not know that, you know it now. I'm not ashamed
Speaker 1: of this totally. I've actually even appeared as my Renaissance
Speaker 1: Festival character on an episode of Stuff You Missed in
Speaker 1: History Class. I'm not going to tell you the episode
Speaker 1: title because I don't remember it off the top of
Speaker 1: my head, but I do appear in it, so it's
Speaker 1: a classic episode. I think might have been Sarah and
Speaker 1: Dablina as the hosts back in those days. Anyway, I'm
Speaker 1: performing at the Georgia Renaissance Festival this year season, and
Speaker 1: the opening day for the Renaissance Festival is the day
Speaker 1: after this podcast airs, so I thought, why not do
Speaker 1: an episode inspired by ye olden times? And yes, I
Speaker 1: know he is actually the We're going to go back
Speaker 1: quite a bit before the Renaissance because today I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about siege engines. I thought it'd be kind
Speaker 1: of fun and sort of in the theme of looking
Speaker 1: back on history as I prepare to don my tights
Speaker 1: and doublet I'm sorry for that mental image anyway. What
Speaker 1: is a siege engine? While it's a device meant to
Speaker 1: allow an attacking army to gain entry to a fortified space,
Speaker 1: typically a fortified city or a castle, something along those lines,
Speaker 1: they're they're used to penetrate or destroy fortress walls or gates,
Speaker 1: and they tend to be enormous and they exert tremendous
Speaker 1: force in their operation. I'm going to focus on siege
Speaker 1: engines from ancient times to medieval history, but you should
Speaker 1: know that siege engines continued to evolve even after medieval era,
Speaker 1: even after the the invention of gunpowder and the distribution
Speaker 1: of gunpowder. To be fair, gunpowder had been invented for
Speaker 1: a very long time before anyone over in medieval Europe
Speaker 1: figured out how to use it as a means for weaponry.
Speaker 1: And uh also, gunpowder ended up making a lot of
Speaker 1: the traditional city defenses ineffective. I'll talk about that more
Speaker 1: later on in this episode, but siege engines were used
Speaker 1: in both world wars. Actually, but I'm gonna save that
Speaker 1: for a different episode. We're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: old stuff, this kind of stuff you might see in
Speaker 1: a movie about nights and royalty and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So siege weapons were necessary to penetrate a fortified position, typically,
Speaker 1: like I said, a city or a castle. So why
Speaker 1: would you lay siege to such a place at all. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it's an effort to make the people inside surrender to
Speaker 1: the people outside. It seems pretty simple. Usually the people
Speaker 1: inside would include someone of importance who kind of had
Speaker 1: the authority to hand over the rule of law for
Speaker 1: that region to somebody else. And the word siege comes
Speaker 1: from a Latin word sederre, which means to sit, And
Speaker 1: that's pretty much what a sieging force does. It sits
Speaker 1: outside a fortified area and it waits. It also usually
Speaker 1: attempts to cut off supplies that are heading into the
Speaker 1: fortified location, both food and water and other things, to
Speaker 1: push the people inside to the point of desperation so
Speaker 1: that they surrender. But sometimes a long wait just isn't convenient.
Speaker 1: You've got places to go, people to meet, lands to conquer,
Speaker 1: so you can't really wait around for people to eat
Speaker 1: that last apple or to draw the last water from
Speaker 1: the well. You've got to find a way to speed
Speaker 1: things up a little bit. You've got to convince them
Speaker 1: that they need to give up, and maybe force them
Speaker 1: to give up, and that requires getting access to the
Speaker 1: place that's fortified. Thus siege engines. Now, archaeologists have uncovered
Speaker 1: evidence of fortified city walls from ancient cities all around
Speaker 1: the world, and in a way, you could say that
Speaker 1: human history is marked by innovations in ways to keep
Speaker 1: a people safe and other innovations designed to overcome those protections.
Speaker 1: It gets a pretty grim when you start thinking about
Speaker 1: specifics and you get down to brass tacks, as it were.
Speaker 1: But if ancient people had fortified walls, what did the
Speaker 1: ancient attackers use to breach those walls. Well, there are
Speaker 1: a couple of different tactics that don't involve siege engines
Speaker 1: at all. For example, you might try and use fire
Speaker 1: to weaken walls. You might tunnel under walls, either to
Speaker 1: collapse the wall so that they just fall down, or
Speaker 1: you end up just bypassing the wall entirely in tunnel
Speaker 1: into the place that you're trying to get access to.
Speaker 1: Or you might just use ladders to try and act
Speaker 1: us the top of the wall and scale it. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that could be dangerous if there are soldiers up at
Speaker 1: the top of the wall to push the ladders down.
Speaker 1: So you've got to hope that you can zerg rush
Speaker 1: it use a whole bunch of people all at once.
Speaker 1: If you don't know what a zer rushes, 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 wall or
Speaker 1: a gate. Uh. This would allow you to have a
Speaker 1: much heavier battering ram than something you would have to
Speaker 1: carry by hand, because you could put it on this
Speaker 1: rope system and just swing it and as opposed to
Speaker 1: having to lift it. According to ancient historians, the earliest
Speaker 1: example of this technology was the brainchild of a certain
Speaker 1: pe frasm No of Tire, and I apologize for absolutely
Speaker 1: butchering the pronunciation of that name, because I'm certain I
Speaker 1: did anyway. This particular engineer would have lived sometime between
Speaker 1: five hundred and three fifty b C. And his His
Speaker 1: main invention was suspending a cross beam from a transverse
Speaker 1: beam for the purposes of swinging it as a battering ram.
Speaker 1: In other words, that design I was talking about hanging
Speaker 1: a wooden beam in a frame so that you can
Speaker 1: bash down a wall or a door. Now, typically you
Speaker 1: would also find that the frames holding these battering rams
Speaker 1: would be shielded by a roof, and often that roof
Speaker 1: would be covered with dampened animal skins. That would help
Speaker 1: cut down on the potential for fire. If you're defending
Speaker 1: city was using flaming arrows or burning oil or something
Speaker 1: on those lines, it would it would reduce the possibility
Speaker 1: that your brand new, shiny battering ram would just become
Speaker 1: kindling and uh. You would also protect yourself from other
Speaker 1: just basic projectiles and allow the operators of the battering
Speaker 1: battering ram to continue hammering against the wall or the door. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this was risky. You had to get access to the
Speaker 1: actual wall and according to Vitruvius, who was an author
Speaker 1: and engineer during the first century, the first person to
Speaker 1: create a fireproofed roofed battering ram was Kros the Carthaginian
Speaker 1: sometimes called Garross with a G the Carthaginian. Modern historians
Speaker 1: believe this person was alive sometime around the fifth century
Speaker 1: b C. And this was after the Iron Age that
Speaker 1: had happened several hundred years earlier, so it was very
Speaker 1: common for the attacking party to cap a battering ram
Speaker 1: with a large iron or otherwise metal cap, often shaped
Speaker 1: in the form of a battering ram like a literal ram,
Speaker 1: like a goat's head with horns. Uh. The iron would
Speaker 1: give the battering ram even more weight and resilience, and
Speaker 1: it would make it more effective. The animals would and
Speaker 1: you know it forms made it look more interesting. But
Speaker 1: they also could help with bashing through the the material,
Speaker 1: depending upon the shapes you were using, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a pretty effective means of knocking down your
Speaker 1: basic city walls. Uh. They You also would see other
Speaker 1: improvements like pulley systems that would allow the battering ram
Speaker 1: to remain horizontal as it swung instead of tilting upward.
Speaker 1: So imagine a swing set swing. You know, when you're
Speaker 1: swinging on a swing, your feet tilt up in the
Speaker 1: air instead of staying horizontal unless you're actively moving your
Speaker 1: legs down. And uh, the pulley system would counteract that
Speaker 1: dency so that way you wouldn't be hitting the wall
Speaker 1: or door on an upward swing. It would be translated
Speaker 1: into a horizontal motion so that that momentum that you're
Speaker 1: transferring would be in the proper direction. And that's what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. The working principle behind the battering ram
Speaker 1: is the transfer of momentum momentum quick recap for people
Speaker 1: who don't remember their physics. It's the quantity of motion
Speaker 1: and a moving body. And the way you arrive at
Speaker 1: the quantity of momentum is by multiplying the mass of
Speaker 1: a moving body by its velocity, So that means momentum
Speaker 1: of a small object that's moving very very very fast
Speaker 1: can be the same as a large object moving much
Speaker 1: more slowly if the numbers work out the right way.
Speaker 1: But if something is really big and really fast, it
Speaker 1: has a whole lot of momentum to it. And I've
Speaker 1: got some funny stories about momentum. I had to explain
Speaker 1: this to a friend of mine. Uh. At the Renaissance Festival,
Speaker 1: there was a moment in a dance dance in which
Speaker 1: it is possible to steal the partner of another person um,
Speaker 1: in which I was trying to steal the queen from
Speaker 1: the king. The king being played by a guy who
Speaker 1: looked an awful lot like Henry the Eighth, including Henry
Speaker 1: the Eighth impressive mass, and this 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 wrists 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 wanted
Speaker 1: to move really quickly so that you can result in
Speaker 1: this large amount of momentum that transfer to a stationary
Speaker 1: object like the wall or the gate, and thus caused
Speaker 1: damage to it. So once battering ram started getting better,
Speaker 1: obviously cities needed to respond, and they began to reinforce
Speaker 1: their walls, making them thicker at the base and trying
Speaker 1: to create new strategies to repel battering ram assaults. My
Speaker 1: favorite battering ram is actually a fictional one. I like
Speaker 1: grond Grand was the battering Ram and Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 1: It was from Suron's army. They used it in the
Speaker 1: siegeen mins Tira, and it was ont long and had
Speaker 1: a metal cap that was shaped like a wolf. And
Speaker 1: the most of the depictions I've seen the wolf is
Speaker 1: also got some sort of fire or lava coming out
Speaker 1: of its mouth, making it pretty intimidating. Awesome image. Really.
Speaker 1: Another ancient season gen 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 uh you want to get past, and
Speaker 1: you have a gang plank at the top of the
Speaker 1: tower that you lower so that it rests on the
Speaker 1: city wall, and then your your force just goes through
Speaker 1: the siege tower, across the gang plank and into the city.
Speaker 1: Then you bipass the wall. Entirely very basic idea. Uh. Obviously,
Speaker 1: things could go wrong. The tower if it were set
Speaker 1: on fire, could end up causing you to lose quite
Speaker 1: a few of your men. Uh. And also there are
Speaker 1: lots of different ways to create obstacles to make it
Speaker 1: more difficult to get the tower up against a city wall.
Speaker 1: One of those would be moats. So your basic moat
Speaker 1: around a castle was really a defense against siege engines
Speaker 1: like this. Uh. It meant that it was much harder
Speaker 1: to get something like a siege tower up against the
Speaker 1: castle walls, because he had to get across the moat first,
Speaker 1: and the moat might either be dry or it could
Speaker 1: be filled with water. Not all moats were water. In fact,
Speaker 1: most of them weren't. Most of them were essentially just
Speaker 1: a very big ditch around the fort fortified area, so
Speaker 1: you would have to find a way to bridge that
Speaker 1: gap if you were an attacker, to allow your siege
Speaker 1: engine to roll over the moats, you had to build
Speaker 1: like essentially a temporary bridge to allow the siege engine
Speaker 1: to roll over it and get access to the city wall.
Speaker 1: And another defense was to redesign city walls in the
Speaker 1: first place. Engineers began to make walls that were very
Speaker 1: thick at the base and would slope from the top
Speaker 1: down to the base, and that slope meant that the
Speaker 1: top of the wall would be further away from a
Speaker 1: tower than the base of the wall. You know, it's
Speaker 1: because it sloped away from the out side. So that
Speaker 1: meant that your gang plank had to be longer in
Speaker 1: order to reach from the siege tower to the top
Speaker 1: of the city wall. And gang planks were really the
Speaker 1: weak points of the siege towers. Assuming that you've major
Speaker 1: siege tower as fireproof as you can manage, which again
Speaker 1: mostly involved putting the hides of animals on the outside
Speaker 1: of the tower and wetting them down, you know, drenching
Speaker 1: them in water as 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 there standing over the height of the wall.
Speaker 1: There's probably a moat below them. The gang planks probably
Speaker 1: not incredibly sturdy or or stable. So the further away
Speaker 1: the top of the siege tower is from the top
Speaker 1: of the wall, the harder it is for the attackers
Speaker 1: to 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 towards the end of this episode.
Speaker 1: Cannon's 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 change.
Speaker 1: Once those became a major element in warfare. At that point,
Speaker 1: those siege engines began to fade into history. You didn't
Speaker 1: really see them anymore. But I'll get more into cannons
Speaker 1: a little bit later in the episode. And I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've already noted that the major disadvantage to both battering
Speaker 1: rams and siege towers is that you have to get
Speaker 1: close to your target for them to work. If the
Speaker 1: defending city has set up other defenses like those trenches
Speaker 1: or pits or spikes, and they have stuff like hot
Speaker 1: oil or flaming weapons, getting close isn't terribly attractive. You
Speaker 1: 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 from much further away. So next I'll
Speaker 1: talk about some of the massive projectile weapons that were used.
Speaker 1: Uh and they relied purely on mechanical physics to hurl
Speaker 1: objects at walls. They're pretty cool. Before I do that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So
Speaker 1: the first projectile siege engine I really want to talk
Speaker 1: about is the ballista. And if you were to take
Speaker 1: a casual glance at a ballista, you might think it's
Speaker 1: an enormous crossbow, and it does resemble a crossbow. But
Speaker 1: they crossbow and the ballista work on two different principles,
Speaker 1: two different two different types of tension. Uh, the operation
Speaker 1: of the ballista depends upon two torsion springs, whereas the
Speaker 1: 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. To make a ballista, you need a pair
Speaker 1: of torsion springs that you can twist tightly so that
Speaker 1: when you release them, they unleash that mechanical force in
Speaker 1: such a way as to throw a projectile, typically a
Speaker 1: large dart with an iron tip at a target. Now,
Speaker 1: in ancient times, a torsion spring might look like a
Speaker 1: loop of some stretchy elastic material. That material was often
Speaker 1: either hair from animals sometimes humans, all woven together to
Speaker 1: make really strong ropes, or sometimes it was ligaments and
Speaker 1: other tissue that was turned into this kind of elastic
Speaker 1: material and then looped around a frame like a skein
Speaker 1: that's inside a frame. So imagine a loop of material.
Speaker 1: In fact, just imagine a rubber band, and imagine that
Speaker 1: you've got two pegs that are a few inches apart
Speaker 1: from each other. They're further apart than the length of
Speaker 1: the rubber band, so you have to stretch the rubber
Speaker 1: band a little bit two loop either end over the
Speaker 1: two pegs. Then you put more rubber bands that are
Speaker 1: the same length over those two pegs, so you've got
Speaker 1: a few of them, maybe four or five. These rubber
Speaker 1: bands represent an unwound torsion spring. If you then inserted
Speaker 1: a throwing arm, what would be considered like the shaft
Speaker 1: of a throwing arm, into that gap the middle of
Speaker 1: all those rubber bands, and then use it to twist
Speaker 1: the rubber bands in a circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
Speaker 1: You would create the hortion. This this twisted tension. You
Speaker 1: look them over and over again. You can do this
Speaker 1: with a pencil. So again, just have a rubber band.
Speaker 1: You can even have maybe someone stand in front of
Speaker 1: you putting their two thumbs up, and you loop the
Speaker 1: rubber bands around their two thumbs so that they're stretching
Speaker 1: them together. You put a pencil in there. You twist
Speaker 1: the pencil around a few times so that it's it's
Speaker 1: twisting the rubber bands, and you'll start building up that tension.
Speaker 1: If you let go of the pencil, then it will
Speaker 1: unleash all that mechanical energy and it will make the
Speaker 1: pencil flip around like crazy. Make sure you use an
Speaker 1: unsharpened pencil and be very careful with this sort of
Speaker 1: stuff because it might fly up and hit you in
Speaker 1: the face. But this is the basic principle of the ballista. Now,
Speaker 1: with the ballista, you have two of these torsion springs,
Speaker 1: and that meant that they're actually vertically aligned, not horizontally aligned.
Speaker 1: In other words, you would have imagine you have one
Speaker 1: thumb higher the the other thumb directly in front of you,
Speaker 1: and you put the rubber bands on so that you
Speaker 1: were holding the loop that way. That's the way the
Speaker 1: ballista torsion springs are aligned. You have to have those
Speaker 1: that vertical alignment and they're parallel to each other, and
Speaker 1: between 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 the 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 ballista, 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 counter clockwise if you were
Speaker 1: looking at it from above. That means that when the
Speaker 1: tension releases, it's going to spend its throwing arm in
Speaker 1: a clockwise direction. The torsion spring on the right side
Speaker 1: is the opposite. It's wound clockwise, so that when you
Speaker 1: release the tension, it will spin the throwing arm counterclockwise.
Speaker 1: And on the opposite end of the throwing arm, you
Speaker 1: have a line attaching the two together, a rope if
Speaker 1: you will or string this rope is looped around the
Speaker 1: end of your projectile. This is the thing that's going
Speaker 1: to transfer the force to the projectile and make it
Speaker 1: fly at your target. So just imagine you've got this
Speaker 1: crossbow looking thing in front of you. The two arms
Speaker 1: of the ballista in its rest position you haven't wound
Speaker 1: it yet, are extended outward to the side. So the
Speaker 1: left one is is almost parallel with the front of
Speaker 1: the ballist, of the right one is almost parallel with
Speaker 1: the ballista, and you have a device called a wind us.
Speaker 1: The windlass is what allows you to crank back those arms.
Speaker 1: It's creating tension in those torsion springs, so it starts
Speaker 1: to twist the torsion springs and as a result, the
Speaker 1: two throwing arms start tilting back towards you. It's that
Speaker 1: they've bend backwards, although the torsion the throwing arms themselves
Speaker 1: are not bending. It's just the torsion springs are are
Speaker 1: rotating as you're twisting them. Uh, so they've been 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 that rope forward as well, transferring the energy
Speaker 1: to your projectile and shooting it at your target. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool to see this, I mean, it's interesting
Speaker 1: to see this as two torsion springs as opposed to
Speaker 1: a crossbow, which would just use the tension of the
Speaker 1: material itself, the wood, if you will, of the bow.
Speaker 1: It's all due to mechanical physics. You don't need any
Speaker 1: chemicals to do this kind of siege engine, and you
Speaker 1: could also just build this thing when you needed it.
Speaker 1: In fact, most siege engines were constructed at site where
Speaker 1: the siege was happening, because they were so big and
Speaker 1: heavy that moving them from one place across country to
Speaker 1: another place was not really practical. So usually we just
Speaker 1: go to the closest forest, cut down some logs, and
Speaker 1: have some workers start to build siege engines right there
Speaker 1: on site, wheel them in a place so that they're
Speaker 1: generally pointed at the thing you want to shoot at,
Speaker 1: and then you start firing. Uh. And the blister was
Speaker 1: an early version of that the earliest ones were in
Speaker 1: the BC era. Uh you would later see them go
Speaker 1: all the way up through the Middle Ages. They were, however,
Speaker 1: not terribly mobile. You could put wheels on the cart
Speaker 1: for a ballista so that you could at least wheel
Speaker 1: them into place, but it wasn't It's not like you
Speaker 1: could easily move them once you planted them. They were
Speaker 1: pretty much stationary once you were firing, and that meant
Speaker 1: that they were pretty attractive targets. They were very accurate,
Speaker 1: but they didn't hurl things at incredible distances. You could
Speaker 1: get a decent distance with them, but they fired in
Speaker 1: a very low arc like essentially, it was a straight
Speaker 1: line from the ballista to the target. Um it kind
Speaker 1: of came out horizontally that way. It didn't fire in
Speaker 1: an arc the way catapults and tributches did. And it
Speaker 1: also did comparatively less damage than catapults and tribushes, largely
Speaker 1: because the projectiles it fired didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: mass to them compared to the rocks that you could
Speaker 1: fire from a catapult or a tributsche. And like I said,
Speaker 1: crossbows or bows in general work in a very similar way,
Speaker 1: but this case it's just tension of the material itself
Speaker 1: as opposed to a tortion spring um so it's your
Speaker 1: basic spring action, but it's the actual tension of the
Speaker 1: wood itself. Torsion springs are also very important in other
Speaker 1: types of seige engines, particularly different types of catapults. Now,
Speaker 1: the nomenclature here gets a little confusing because a lot
Speaker 1: of people use the word catapult to refer to a
Speaker 1: very specific type of siege engine, and other people use
Speaker 1: catapult to describe an entire family of siege engines, including
Speaker 1: Ballista in some cases. But essentially, catapults were meant to
Speaker 1: hurl massive objects through the air. So in order to
Speaker 1: avoid confusion, I'm going to talk about the Manganell and
Speaker 1: the Tribuche, which are often both lumped under the general
Speaker 1: category of catapult, but they operate in very different ways.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the Manganell, which was that before
Speaker 1: the Tribute. The Mangonell was a siege engine of the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, so it came to into development after the Ballista.
Speaker 1: Ballista we're still being used in siegeons 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 you know has the horizontal bow, but if you
Speaker 1: were to wield an actual bow, like the kind you
Speaker 1: fire arrows from, you would hold it vertically. Well, the
Speaker 1: manganell is like that. It's vertical, but it only has
Speaker 1: one arm. You don't you don't have a lower half
Speaker 1: to it. Uh, there's just the throwing arm and the
Speaker 1: torsion spring, and the torsion spring is aligned horizontally instead
Speaker 1: of vertically. So it's like that first example of the
Speaker 1: rubber bands I was talking about, where you're holding your
Speaker 1: thumbs side by side as the torsion spring. Same thing
Speaker 1: with the mangonell. So the throwing arm when it's in
Speaker 1: its rest position is vertical. More or less. There's actually
Speaker 1: typically a stop so that it can't go completely vertical.
Speaker 1: It will usually be at a pretty high angle. When
Speaker 1: you wind the torsion spring, you pull the throwing arm
Speaker 1: back until it's practically horizontal, and then you latch it
Speaker 1: 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. So
Speaker 1: a mangonel could have this bowl like end to it,
Speaker 1: and that's where you would put your various projectiles. They
Speaker 1: might be rocks or firepots, or, at least according to
Speaker 1: some accounts, dead stuff. The dead stuff was meant to
Speaker 1: hurt defenders in two ways. First, it's pretty psychologically devastating
Speaker 1: to have corpses thrown at you, true story. Second, it
Speaker 1: was thought of as a way to introduce disease into
Speaker 1: 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 let's just
Speaker 1: run up the white flag and stop this. The manganell
Speaker 1: fired projectiles at high velocity and at a low arc,
Speaker 1: so it was a higher arc than the ballista, which
Speaker 1: again was pretty much a straight line, so there was
Speaker 1: a slight arc to it, 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 uh. It was meant to destroy defensive structures
Speaker 1: rather than go around them. If you look at the
Speaker 1: arc of projectiles from siege engines, Ballista are the lowest,
Speaker 1: Manganelles would be next, and then Tribute Chase would be
Speaker 1: nice high arcs Now, according to the resources I looked at,
Speaker 1: Manganelles could hurl projectiles as far as feet, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty fair distance to throw a massive stone using
Speaker 1: pure mechanical power. And like other season Jin's, the real
Speaker 1: genius by the manganell was that it was pretty simple
Speaker 1: to construct. You could again just build it on location.
Speaker 1: Next I will talk about tribouches and then lead it
Speaker 1: with some cannon talk. But before I get into all
Speaker 1: of that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors,
Speaker 1: and now to talk about the Tribute Shade. It was
Speaker 1: a very different beast than the Manganel. It was named
Speaker 1: after a word an old French which means to throw over,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of what the Tribute Shade did. It
Speaker 1: through projectiles in a high arc, they could be used
Speaker 1: to attack defensive walls, or just bypass the walls completely
Speaker 1: and hurled pload into fortified cities. Having massive rocks raining
Speaker 1: down on your homes as a powerful motivator when it
Speaker 1: comes time to consider surrender. The Tribute shade didn't depend
Speaker 1: upon torsion springs the way Ballista and Mengonells 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 see saw, so think of a seesaw,
Speaker 1: but it has a long end and a short end.
Speaker 1: The counterweight is on the short end and the long
Speaker 1: end is what hurls the payload. So seesaws are pretty
Speaker 1: good analogy. If you have a seesaw balanced in the center,
Speaker 1: too identical weights will balance out. You put two kids
Speaker 1: on there the way the same the seesaws 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 of the actual orientation
Speaker 1: of the seesaw. The shorter end will end up sticking
Speaker 1: up in the air, and the longer end will rest
Speaker 1: against the ground. Now, because your typical tribute she uses
Speaker 1: a short arm to hold the counterweight. That means, by
Speaker 1: this little experiment we just talked about, you would actually
Speaker 1: need a lot more weight in the counterweight than you're
Speaker 1: going to have in the payload. Otherwise, your payload just
Speaker 1: is gonna sit on the ground and the counterweight would
Speaker 1: just dangle in the air. It would not have the
Speaker 1: weights sufficient enough to pull the lever so that it
Speaker 1: flings your payload at your enemy. The counterweight was also
Speaker 1: typically hinged, meaning that it could swing around on the
Speaker 1: end of this short side of the the tribute shay
Speaker 1: beam that allows that to swing around so it doesn't
Speaker 1: risk hitting the ground and mucking everything up. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a ferris wheel ride. The compartments on affairs
Speaker 1: wheel are hinged so that people inside the right are
Speaker 1: always in an upright orientation with regard to the ground.
Speaker 1: The same is true for tribute shay counterweights, at least
Speaker 1: with most of them anyway. Now, the huge throwing arm
Speaker 1: hurls payloads that are placed in a sling, so it's
Speaker 1: not like it has a bowl at the end of
Speaker 1: it the way a mangonel did, at least not your
Speaker 1: typical tribute shay. Typically you would use a sling instead.
Speaker 1: So if you don't know what a sling is, imagine
Speaker 1: a pocket and you have two sides of this pocket
Speaker 1: with cords coming from those two sides, one chord on
Speaker 1: each side. Uh And typically the way you would use
Speaker 1: a sling, as you put a rock in the sling,
Speaker 1: you swing the sling around your head. You let go
Speaker 1: of one of the chords while holding onto the other one,
Speaker 1: and that releases the rock, slinging it at your target
Speaker 1: hopefully and not behind you unless you're me, in which
Speaker 1: case it goes wherever it wants to go, because I
Speaker 1: can't use a sling in a tribute shame. One of
Speaker 1: those two chords is permanently attached to the long end
Speaker 1: of the arm, So you've got one end of the
Speaker 1: sling permanently affixed to the tribute shay. The other chord,
Speaker 1: the other end, has a large ring at the very
Speaker 1: end of it, and on the very end of the
Speaker 1: throwing arm itself, there's a little projection called the finger
Speaker 1: that extends outward at a certain angle from the end
Speaker 1: of the beam. And by certain angle, I mean you
Speaker 1: determine what the angle is when you build the tribute shame,
Speaker 1: so if you like it, you should have put a
Speaker 1: ring on it. So that's what you do with the
Speaker 1: tribute shay. You slide the slings ring over the finger.
Speaker 1: So when you want to fire a payload, you have
Speaker 1: to raise the counterweight into the upright position and lock
Speaker 1: it in places. Typically you have a mechanism there to
Speaker 1: keep it from sliding back down or to swinging back
Speaker 1: down is the better way to say it. And then
Speaker 1: you load your sling with whatever your payload is, like
Speaker 1: a giant rock. You then take the ring that's on
Speaker 1: one end and you slide it over the finger of
Speaker 1: the throwing arm. When you fire the tribute shay, you
Speaker 1: remove the block that allows the counterweight too, or locks
Speaker 1: the counterweight in place. I should say this allows the
Speaker 1: counterweight to fall. It forces the short end of the
Speaker 1: lever down. The long end is forced upward, and as
Speaker 1: it moves upward, centrifugal force, which is not really a force,
Speaker 1: but never mind that centrigal centrifical force pushes the sling
Speaker 1: outward um and so then as the arm moves through
Speaker 1: this arc, the ring on the end of that finger
Speaker 1: slips free. Once it hits the proper angle as you
Speaker 1: determined when you were building the tribute shape. When it
Speaker 1: slips free of the finger, it releases the payload, throwing
Speaker 1: it in that high arc, and it sales majestically overhead
Speaker 1: towards your target. And because the counterweight is heavy enough,
Speaker 1: it descends very quickly, so the this means there's a
Speaker 1: very high increase in linear velocity for the throwing arm
Speaker 1: and thus the payload. The release angle of the payload
Speaker 1: is dependent upon the angle of the finger. That little projection,
Speaker 1: relatively little projection at the end of your tribute shape.
Speaker 1: So if you want to change the release angle, you
Speaker 1: change the angle of the finger, and then the ring
Speaker 1: will come off at a different point in that arc,
Speaker 1: and thus the payload will fly in a different arc
Speaker 1: towards your target. Of course, you're probably not using perfectly
Speaker 1: uniform stones, so it's not an exact science. You might
Speaker 1: be using stones of slightly different weights, which means that
Speaker 1: that's gonna change the arc as well. But still the
Speaker 1: principle is fairly sound. And then we get to the
Speaker 1: invention and more importantly, the employment of gunpowder in siege weaponry.
Speaker 1: Gunpowder was actually invented in Asia centuries before it became
Speaker 1: a useful tool in warfare. But it really wasn't until
Speaker 1: about the fifteenth century that you would see massive artillery
Speaker 1: guns regularly utilized in medieval Europe. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of earlier examples and a lot of historical accounts that
Speaker 1: at least say that cannons were in use, although the
Speaker 1: definition of cannon has changed dramatically over the centuries, so
Speaker 1: some of those accounts are difficult to um verify, simply
Speaker 1: because the cannon that's being referred to in one battle
Speaker 1: maybe a significantly different kind of weapon than one from
Speaker 1: another battle. Uh. There's definitely some evidence of cannons being
Speaker 1: used in sieges though, and in the Hundred Years War
Speaker 1: in northern France. England employed some cannons in a battle
Speaker 1: in thirteen forty six. How many cannons, well, that kind
Speaker 1: of depends upon which historical account, and you believe it's
Speaker 1: somewhere between five and twenty six. And the English won
Speaker 1: the battle. So was that because of the devastating power
Speaker 1: of their fully operational death stuff. I'm sorry, cannon's probably not.
Speaker 1: In fact, the English cannons likely did very little actual
Speaker 1: damage against the Genoese mercenaries. They were fighting the Genoese
Speaker 1: mercenaries were fighting on behalf of France, but it really
Speaker 1: scared the pantaloons off those guys because the Genoese were
Speaker 1: really rattled by those loud, smoky weapons and they were
Speaker 1: soundly defeated. But the actual defeat came at the hands
Speaker 1: of traditional English soldiers wielding stuff like swords and axes
Speaker 1: and bows rather than the cannons. And besides, that's not
Speaker 1: even really a siege, so I'm not really gonna talk
Speaker 1: anymore about it. By sixteen seventy, you'd actually see the
Speaker 1: word cannon being used to describe specific types of guns.
Speaker 1: Mounted guns, typically stationary ones like you could roll them
Speaker 1: into place, but they weren't meant to be moved around rapidly.
Speaker 1: The biggest one at that time was called the cannon Royal,
Speaker 1: and typically cannon Royal would weigh around eight thousand pounds
Speaker 1: or three thousand six ms if you prefer and it
Speaker 1: could fire cannonballs weighing at around sixty three pounds or rams.
Speaker 1: That's massive. Then you had whole cannon and dimmi cannon guns.
Speaker 1: Those were of decreasing size and weight and could fire
Speaker 1: smaller cannonballs, and by smaller I mean that the smallest
Speaker 1: gut down to be about twenty eight pounds. They're still
Speaker 1: really heavy, particularly if you compare them to the types
Speaker 1: of cannon you'd find on sailing ships a century later.
Speaker 1: Eventually we would refer to cannon by the the weight
Speaker 1: of the shot they fired. What kind of cannonball would
Speaker 1: they fire? So if you hear about a ten pound gun,
Speaker 1: it meant that the shot it fired aired weight ten pounds.
Speaker 1: The gun itself didn't weigh ten pounds, it weighed weigh
Speaker 1: more than that, but the cannonballs weighed ten pounds. So
Speaker 1: if you're about a twenty pounder, that meant that the
Speaker 1: cannonballs weighed twenty pounds. So the bigger the pound edge,
Speaker 1: that just means the heavier the shot, and thus the
Speaker 1: more damaged the cannon would do if you hit what
Speaker 1: you were aiming at. Well, the cannon made earlier city
Speaker 1: defenses completely useless. High walls were not good protection against
Speaker 1: cannon fire, which typically fire in a pretty low arc
Speaker 1: at a very high velocity, so instead new defenses were invented. Essentially,
Speaker 1: new walls were built, and these were lower walls and
Speaker 1: thicker walls. Defensive walls were made to withstand high impacts
Speaker 1: from cannon fire, and because defenders would often have guns
Speaker 1: of their own, traditional methods of breaching walls were pretty
Speaker 1: bad choices. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense
Speaker 1: to wheel a siege engine slowly toward a wall. If
Speaker 1: you're being fired pawned by cannon, you'd be a sitting duck.
Speaker 1: So it completely changed warfare from that moment forward. You
Speaker 1: also saw other changes as well, from armor to swords
Speaker 1: and all sorts of stuff, all because gunpowder had entered
Speaker 1: the scene. Cannons themselves are fascinating all the way, from
Speaker 1: the early bronze guns to the steel guns that redefined
Speaker 1: warfare yet again, but that warrants its own episode. For now,
Speaker 1: I need to say farewell, and I need to get
Speaker 1: ready for the Renaissance Festival. If you're in the Atlanta area,
Speaker 1: you should really come out and see us. It's pretty
Speaker 1: entertaining day out. And if you guys have suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, you should write me and
Speaker 1: let me know about them. The address is tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook or Twitter. My handle at both is
Speaker 1: tech stuff h s W now talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works? Dot com W