Catapults

Catapult:

With the arrival of fortifications such as forts, strongholds and gigantic walls to protect cities from hostile forces, conquering cities became so difficult and costly to do that every civilization must come up with an ingenious way to overcome this problem. Out of all methods ranging from complex engineering feats such as the siege tower to simple methods such as employing ladders, none are as well-known or as old as the catapult.

The catapult is a siege engine that propels a variety of projectiles, it’s one of the first method to overcome to the problems posed by fortifications.

The first catapult was invented around 400 BC in the Greek Town of Syracuse. The leader of the townspeople, Dionysius the elder orders the research and development of weapons to prepare the colony for a long war with the Carthage, one of the weapons devised is called the Gastraphete, similar to the crossbow but a greater force must be exerted to release of a larger and more powerful projectile. The Greeks were so impressed that they persevered to develop a bigger and more powerful version of the Gastraphete called the ballista. The Romans took inspiration from the Greeks to create their own catapult, within a few years of development, the Romans have successfully created the mangonel as a lighter alternative to the ballista and wheels are added to increase mobility. Unlike the ballista, the mangonel is less accurate although has a superior range and can hurl projectiles weighing up to 200 pounds. The mangonel reached Europe during the medieval era and was used extensively by the French. It was then introduced to England in 1216 when the French besieged Dover. The mangonel was later refined by the French into the first version of the catapu...

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...orking trebuchet of medieval design today is at Warwick Castle, which is used as a tourist attraction and is fired by members of the public under professional supervision. It stands 19m tall and uses a 6 ton counterweight to fire 15kg stone balls distances exceeding several hundred feet. A modernly designed trebuchet, called T-Wrecks, can throw pianos weighing 250 kg over 100 m. In England a group of farmers threw a car close to 122 m and a 55 gallon drum filled with gasoline over 300 m.

Although he catapult is no longer an effective weapon of war, it still arises a considerable amount of questions, how are people from the past able to think of a machine more complex than anything that could possibly imagined at that time. The creation of this weapon requires very precise skill and work, this only goes to show that we can be much more innovative than we already are.